Eurex Exchange has bolstered its off-book request for quote (RFQ) platform, EnLight, and provided clients the ability to negotiate anonymously and with a new tool that ranks respondents.
Known as Smart RFQ, the ranking tool will give users access to a list of opted-in members that are most likely to respond to an RFQ against four criteria for the product or product group being requested.
The criteria include volume, average response time, and rate on Eurex EnLight, and trade to quote ratio. The respondent rankings are also weighted according to the importance the requester places on them, and a ‘wildcard’ responder is added to the list to encourage new responders in the flow.
“Eurex EnLight Smart RFQ is ultimately assisting requesters to source – for themselves or their clients – the tightest prices with the least amount of leakage possible,” said Eurex market models’ product manager, Simon Brown.
Alongside Smart RFQ, the anonymous negotiation functionality will give users the option to select whether their RFQ negotiations will be anonymous. However, Eurex said this presents challenges in terms of how the responder can judge the quality of the request.
In response to these challenges, the exchange has implemented the trade request ratio (TRR) capability, which allows users to limit the number of anonymous RFQs they receive by setting a threshold to certain quality flow.
Since launching in March 2018, Eurex added the EnLight platform has grown rapidly with more than 3 million contracts traded by the end of July this year.
Eurex also introduced and then extended a transaction fee waiver for certain trades to support requesters on the platform until 31 December this year. The exchange said the move would incentivise usage of the platform to increase efficiency and negotiation.