‘Street Fighter’ SEF RTX grows in interdealer swaps market

A new electronic swap execution facility (Sef) run by former Javelin founder James Cawley and ex-TP Icap broker Christopher Jonns is growing rapidly in a corner of the rates market still dominated by voice trading.

Despite the supremacy of e-trading in the dealer-to-client market, in the interdealer market, quirks of market structure and broker incentives have helped phone trading retain firm grip on activity. But large banks havebeen quietly routing an increasing volume of interdealer interest rate swap trades to RTX FinTech, which offers a unique orderbook model, order flow improvements and fee savings.

“The dealer-to-customer market is about 90% electronic enquiry,” says Jonns. “If you look at the dealer-to-dealer broker market, it’s zero. We took our bet that that discrepancy is not going to exist in the future,” he says. It also has a unique soundtrack taken from iconic martial arts video game Street Fighter, inthe hope of appealing to its target audience of swaps traders.