EBS was created by a partnership of large
foreign exchange (FX)
market making banks in 1990 to challenge
Reuters' threatened
monopoly in interbank
spot foreign exchange and provide effective competition. By 2007, approximately US$164 billion in
spot foreign exchange transactions were traded every day over EBS's
central limit order book, EBS Market. EBS's closest competitor is London Stock Exchange Group's FX Matching service (LSEG Matching). The decision by an FX trader whether to use EBS or LSEG Matching is driven largely by the availability of a required
currency pair. In practice, EBS is the primary
trading venue for EUR/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, USD/CHF, EUR/CHF and USD/CNH, and LSEG Matching is the primary trading venue for commonwealth (AUD/USD, NZD/USD, USD/CAD) and emerging market currency pairs. EBS initiated e-trading in spot precious metals, spanning spot gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and remains the leading electronic broker in spot gold and silver through the Loco London Market. They were the first organisation to facilitate orderly black box or
algorithmic trading in spot FX, through an
application programming interface (API). By 2007 this accounted for 60% of all EBS flow. In addition to spot FX and Precious Metals, EBS has expanded trading products through its venues to include NDFs, forwards and FX options. It has also increased the range of trading style to include
RFQ and streaming in disclosed and non-disclosed environments. EBS was acquired by
ICAP, the world's largest
inter-dealer broker, in June 2006. In 2014, EBS merged with BrokerTec—a service provider in the fixed income markets—to form EBS BrokerTec. BrokerTec offers trading technology for many US and European fixed income products including US Treasuries, European Government Bonds and European Repo. In 2017, EBS BrokerTec was renamed to NEX Markets and the name EBS BrokerTec ceased to exist. The names of the trading platforms, EBS and BrokerTec, remained. In 2018, NEX Markets was acquired by CME Group. == Structure ==