The Moscow Exchange (MOEX) has announced on Friday the completion of its acquisition of a 17 percent stake in BierbaumPro AG, thus strengthening its position in the Russian forex (FX) market.
The deal looks attractive as NTProgress is the wholly-owned subsidiary of BierbaumPro and also its main asset. NTProgress is known for the development of the proprietary over-the-counter (OTC) FX platform NTPro.
The offerings of the platform including liquidity aggregation, matching, and algo execution across a range of forex instruments. Since its launch in 2016, NTProgress has become one of the leading providers of the Russian OTC FX electronic market by onboarding over 30 banks as its clients.
As Finance Magnates reported earlier, the acquisition deal was first unveiled in March this year as MOEX entered into an official agreement with BierbaumPro. Under the terms, the exchange will consolidate ownership of up to 100 percent of BierbaumPro’s equity over the next three years.
The official announcement also detailed that the partnership between MOEX and NTProgress will expand both companies’ services by combining NTPro’s highly flexible advanced FX trading solutions with MOEX’s clearing and settlement facilities.
A surge in Russian FX demand
Meanwhile, Russia is witnessing a significant growth of retail investors in its FX market. In May, MOEX revealed that the number of retail investor accounts on the exchange touched 5 million – a 25 percent year-on-year jump.
The rise in the retail investors resulted in the pumping of RUB 34.6 billion or nearly $470 billion into shares during April’s volatile trading – twice as much as the maximum volume of purchases for any month in 2019.
Institutional demand for OTC derivatives trading in Russia is also increasing, and the open interest on MOEX’s standardized OTC derivatives market touched RUB 547 billion at the end of 30 June 2020, a 25 percent uptick from the previous year.
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