oneZero Expands into Institutional Market

oneZero Financial Systems, a provider of FX liquidity and technology solutions mostly for the retail space, is making enhancements that will allow it to further cater to institutional buy-side firms and wholesale brokers.

It is improving its user interface and adding functionality to its Ecosystem platform that will allow buy-side firms to create customized liquidity pools. These enhancements will be available to institutional clients in September. 

The oneZero Ecosystem is a distribution channel catering to more than 200 participants, including banks, brokerages, and various hedge funds. Phil Weisberg, executive vice president of strategic planning and partnerships at oneZero, says an example of enhanced functionality is allowing buy-side firms to have multiple liquidity streams from a single bank. 

“We really enable the consumer of liquidity to source it any way they want. So you can have 10 different streams coming in from a single bank. One stream could be focused on top-of-book trades; one stream could be focused on really large trades that have a huge amount of market impact; another stream could be focused on medium-size trades that don’t have that much market impact. So we’re giving our clients a lot of resolution, so they can take in as many streams as they want—multiple streams from a single financial institution,” he says.

This functionality allows clients to optimize connections with their liquidity provider (LP) and customize them.

oneZero sees this as a three-stage process. The first stage is to take in all the liquidity available to the end-user. The second stage is to group that liquidity in clusters that oneZero calls ‘maker pools’. Weisberg says this allows the institution to build liquidity pools tailored for certain types of flow. The third stage, he says, is to enable the client to create a set of rules to determine which pool to send the order to, and how to manage it. 

“When you’re an institutional participant, you have a lot of different execution choices, right? You can give somebody an order in a full amount, or you could sweep a book. When you go to the portal world, they usually put you in a box—either you’re a sweeping person, or you’re a full amount person. A lot of times, the liquidity you get is effectively shared with other clients and set up by the portal, so you don’t really have any idea about what you’re accessing,” he says. 

Clients also have access to the data, allowing them to examine how trades were executed, and how their LPs performed. The transaction information can be segmented, tagged, and analyzed on an aggregate basis or an entity-by-entity basis. 

“The hardest thing for the clients has been to keep score and to really be able to re-evaluate their strategies. Now that we’ve got these institutional, organizational concepts rolling out in our software, we can take the same precision that we’ve been giving to retail brokers and essentially open it up to both the buy side and wholesale brokers,” Weisberg says.

Building the Team

In the last few years, the company has added people with institutional backgrounds. It recently hired Jamie Rose as director of relationship management. Rose is charged with developing and managing client relationships across the UK and Western Europe. He previously served as head of eFX at Xenfin and Marex Spectron.

Meanwhile, Weisberg, who served as a strategic advisor to oneZero in June 2018, has previously served as CEO of FXall. He also led the FX rates and credit business at then-Thomson Reuters, and was managing director of global FX derivatives trading at JP Morgan. 

Additionally, Uri Lerman, former managing director at StateStreet, joined oneZero as segment manager for institutional brokers in April.

“Between the three of us, we put forward an investment program in oneZero in taking the software that was designed for retail brokers and transitioning it to be applicable for wholesale brokers and the buy side,” Weisberg says.