360T was once again a sponsor and active participant in the TradeTech FX (TTFX) conference in Barcelona, which brought together over 500 senior FX industry professionals for three days of discussions, analysis, and debates on key marketplace issues.
Given the extensive industry representation at the conference and the breadth and quality of the sessions, we thought it would be useful to provide a roundup of our key takeaways from the event:
1. Growing pains in the world’s largest asset class
2. The incentives for FX Swaps optimisation come into sharper focus for banks
3. Are credit limitations making best execution harder to achieve?
4. Automation remains a natural end-point
5. Corporate Treasurers provide a boost to TTFX
1. Growing pains in the world’s largest asset class
Upon reflection, many of the key talking points, both on the panels and in discussion at the sidelines of the event, centred around the challenges associated with effectively trading FX during a period when this marketplace appears to still be growing rapidly. The recent Bank for International Settlements (BIS) OTC FX survey found that almost $9.6 trillion in notional volume is traded in this asset class every day, significantly up from the $7.5 trillion recorded in 2022.
It’s worth noting that this is at least in part due to the fact that the BIS survey was conducted in April, shortly after the announcement of major tariffs by the US sent shockwaves through the global financial marketplace, driving up volatility — and subsequently trading volumes — in the FX market. But even prior to 2025, it was clear that the FX market has remained in growth mode. This is reflected in the trading volumes on 360T; last year the average daily volume (ADV) across our venue was up 16% from 2023 and this year it is currently up 13% from that high watermark in 2024.
On the one hand, this growth is the sign of a healthy marketplace and indicates the increasing adoption of technology solutions which are making it more efficient and scalable. On the other hand, this growth is bringing with it a slew of challenges for market participants on both the buy-side and sell-side.
2. The incentives for FX Swaps optimisation come into sharper focus for banks
The most recent BIS survey confirmed once again that FX Swaps are, by quite some margin, the most traded FX instrument. Average daily turnover of FX Swaps rose to $4 trillion in April 2025, meaning that these products account for 42% of all global FX trading activity.
Yet the adoption of new technology for trading these instruments has, broadly speaking, not kept pace with this growth. Listening to banks at TTFX, it seems like this might be about to
change. They highlighted that the costs associated with trading these instruments has increased alongside this volume growth, making the incentives to optimise their operations via the introduction of new technology even more acute. Historically, credit has been a major barrier preventing the implementation of more advanced trading and execution tools, like those we have seen adopted for Spot FX trading. This barrier has, from a technological perspective, been overcome — 360T’s Swaps User Network (SUN), for example, now offers multiple automated credit models and is facilitating interbank API trading.
The only remaining hurdle then is perhaps the ability of banks to adopt this type of technology into their existing setups and embrace a new paradigm for FX Swaps trading. Based on conversations at the TTFX event, it seems the economic incentives for doing so are piling up.
3. Are credit limitations making best execution harder to achieve?
The story on the buy-side is not altogether dissimilar. Many of the large asset managers in attendance at TTFX indicated that the volume of FX Swaps that they are being tasked with handling has increased, in some cases dramatically so. Yet in certain instances, it appears that their available credit lines have not expanded at a comparable pace. This can present a conundrum because they have a fiduciary obligation to achieve best execution on behalf of their investors, but insufficient credit can ultimately dictate both counterparties and execution strategies — a constraint that may conflict with this obligation.
As a result, freeing up balance sheet capacity has become a pressing priority. One potential avenue is connecting with other market participants that hold offsetting flows. Peer-to-peer solutions have been debated at TTFX for years now, but this time there was a palpable sense that buy-side firms are exploring more innovative approaches to the problem.
In parallel, there was heightened discussion about the benefits of fungibility between the OTC and listed FX markets. Tools such as Exchange for Physicals (EFPs) allow firms to combine the flexibility and liquidity of OTC trading with the capital efficiency of listed, centrally cleared futures. Crucially, these instruments help reduce costs by unlocking balance sheet capacity. This is a trend we expect to accelerate in the years ahead.
4. Automation remains a natural end-point
The pressure to enhance trading efficiency is not limited to the FX Swaps market, however. An overarching theme of the conference was that the buy-side is looking for ways to leverage technology in order to trade FX more efficiently, and automation tools are the most obvious solution to this.
Before proceeding, it’s worth just breaking down what “efficiency” means in this context. As noted previously, one element of this is cost. Everyone in the industry is looking for ways to keep their costs down, even as they handle ever larger FX trading volumes. Using advanced, highly customisable automation tools in conjunction with high-quality market data as a tolerance check has enabled many buy-side firms to effectively conduct full, notouch automated trading or significant chunks of their daily FX volumes while still ensuring they meet their best execution mandates.
As an increasing amount of data demonstrates the efficacy of this approach, we expect to see broader adoption of this technology. Such automation helps buy-side firms to scale while maintaining a stable headcount and still achieving best execution from a pricing perspective.
But there’s also a productivity gain to be had — traders’ skills and expertise can be re-deployed from low value tasks (e.g. clicking through on a screen to execute small, vanilla trades) to higher value ones (e.g. conducting trade analytics, consulting for portfolio managers, etc), driving better outcomes for their organisation.
There is also an operational efficiency to be realised. In addition to streamlining day-to-day operations across the entire trade lifecycle, buy-side firms at TTFX highlighted that the implementation of rules-based automation can help reduce risks by eliminating many existing manual processes. Based on our conversations at the conference, it seems that the buy-side is — broadly speaking — moving from the point where they are learning about automation towards now looking at specific use cases for its implementation and building detailed plans for adoption. It is no longer a question of if they should automate more of their FX, but rather what is the most effective way of doing so.
5. Corporate Treasurers provide a boost to TTFX
Although TTFX has always billed itself as “the largest buy-side FX conference”, the buy-side audience has historically skewed heavily towards asset managers and hedge funds. In recent years the event has been broadening its horizons by inviting more corporate treasurers, and in Barcelona it was clear that it is approaching critical mass with this important segment of the market place.
One of the benefits of having more treasurers at the event was that it broadened the number of different perspectives and viewpoints expressed on the panel sessions. The FX concerns of this group vary compared to other buy-side firms in attendance in numerous ways. For instance, 360T hosted a workshop at TTFX, Treasury Centralisation Strategies: Leveraging Market Data and Technology for End-to-End Efficiency.
The discussion centred around the centralisation of treasuries, exploring the different layers and models of treasury setups and the implications which each one has in terms of FX workflows, technology integration, counterparty limit management, execution optimisation, etc. Clearly, much of the conversation was specifically relevant to the treasury attendees at the event.
But another benefit of having more treasurers at TTFX was that the event represented an opportunity for them to learn from senior figures at buy-side who they might not have a chance to interact with otherwise. For example, panel sessions on the evolution of FX algo usage within the FX market or how data and automation tools are being combined to help streamline trading operations undoubtedly contained many points of interest for the corporate treasury representatives in attendance.
Over the past 25 years 360T has built and broadened our technology offering to accommodate the needs of the global buy-side community, recognising while we have done so that this community is highly diverse and heterogeneous, with many firms having highly divergent execution needs and goals. So from our perspective, it is a positive step to see TTFX broadening its horizons to similarly reflect this.
