Incumbent firms upgrade tech to win back market share in swaps

Wall Street's biggest banks seeking to reduce response times to clients on US dollar swap-execution facilities are switching to technology that automatically quotes prices to catch up with speedy rivals, such as Citadel Securities.

Size and speed are often thought to be mutually exclusive – it has certainly seemed that way in the US dollar swaps market, where new entrant Citadel Securities arrived in late 2014 with nothing but a sharp algorithm and tight prices, and proceeded to wrest market share from its big, ponderous rivals. On occasions, banks were so slow to respond to quote requests that clients did not even wait to see the price.

Now, some incumbent dealers are trying to add zip to their own swaps business, by