Wei, please tell us a little about your career background and current day-to-day responsibilities.
I began my career in the City of London in 2003 and entered the financial markets in 2006. Over the years, I have held senior roles spanning finance, operations, and senior management across both retail and institutional businesses. This experience has given me a practical, ground-level understanding of market structure, liquidity dynamics, and how institutions manage risk across different market cycles.
Today, as Global Managing Director of ATFX Connect, my role is focused less on day-to-day execution and more on setting strategic direction and driving sustainable growth. This includes expanding our global footprint, strengthening regulatory resilience, technology development, and continuously evolving our institutional offering to meet clients’ changing trading needs around capital efficiency, transparency, and multi-asset exposure. I work closely with a highly experienced leadership team with a shared vision for the business, and that journey has closely mirrored the growth and evolution of ATFX Connect.
ATFX Connect is the institutional and professional arm of the wider ATFX Group. What range of tailored solutions does it provide?
ATFX Connect delivers a comprehensive suite of institutional services, including both Principal and Agency pricing across a wide range of asset classes, we also provide True Prime of Prime services in Spot FX and Precious Metals via a variety of credit and technology pathways. What differentiates ATFX Connect is not simply the breadth of services, but how we structure them.
Each brokerage firm has a distinct risk appetite, balance sheet profile, and strategic horizon. Rather than applying standardised models, we design bespoke execution, liquidity, and margin frameworks aligned to each client’s objectives, allowing them to operate efficiently across different market conditions rather than relying on one-size-fits-all solutions.
How does being part of the ATFX Group strengthen ATFX Connect’s institutional offering?
As the institutional arm of ATFX Group, with a presence in over 24 financial hubs and a team of more than 700 professionals, ATFX Connect benefits from strong balance sheet support and scale. This also allows us to take a long-term approach to liquidity relationships, technology investment, and risk management, rather than optimising purely for short-term returns.
The Group’s retail presence also gives us valuable flow insights, which help enhance liquidity depth and execution stability. In practical terms, this enables us to maintain stable liquidity and consistent terms through periods of market stress, such as sharp rate repricing or commodity dislocations.
What types of clients are benefiting from the bespoke service your firm offers?
We work with a broad spectrum of institutional clients, including hedge funds, asset managers, proprietary trading firms, regional banks, family offices, and brokers. Many operate multi-strategy and multi-asset models across multiple regions. Our global presence allows us to offer bespoke solutions that are responsive to the specific regulatory environments and market conditions within each region, ensuring our clients receive locally relevant support backed by global expertise.
A common theme among our clients is that they have outgrown retail-style or semi-institutional setups. They require deeper liquidity, more stable execution quality, and greater balance sheet efficiency. Our institutional-grade infrastructure supports these sophisticated requirements, allowing clients to focus on strategy execution with confidence in the resilience and consistency of their trading environment.
Who are the key members of your institutional services executive team?
Our institutional business is led by senior professionals across key areas such as liquidity, sales, risk, technology, and operations. Leadership in business development is regionalised, with dedicated heads overseeing each major territory – key members including: Simon Naish, Country Head of ATFX Australia, Ivan Wong, Managing Director of Institutional Business in APAC, Hormoz Faryar, Managing Director of Institutional Sales in MEA, Dany Mawas, CEO and Co-founder of Fortress Core Connect, our exclusive partner supporting institutional business in South Africa, and Michael Mirarchi, Managing Director of our Institutional Sales in Latam.
This structure positions decision-making close to the client—particularly around pricing, margin, and execution frameworks—and enables us to respond quickly to changing market conditions without relying on rigid or overly centralised escalation processes.
What feedback do you most frequently hear from institutional clients about why they chose ATFX Connect?
Clients consistently highlight stability and predictability over headline pricing. They value our robust balance sheet, consistent execution quality, transparent agency models, and disciplined margin treatment, especially during stressed market conditions and periods of heightened volatility as we have seen in the last few months.
Another recurring theme is access. Clients appreciate being able to engage directly with senior management when strategic decisions are required, supported by our global presence and regional sales and business development teams.
Why are increasing numbers of firms attracted to your institutional ecosystem?
Institutions are increasingly seeking long-term, dependable partners who deliver consistency and reliability across different market environments. They want providers who understand how their strategies behave under varying volatility conditions and can adapt liquidity, margin, and execution models accordingly.
We are seeing strong demand from firms looking to consolidate counterparties while maintaining execution quality, transparency, and effective risk management. Our ability to adapt liquidity, margin, and execution models to align with clients’ strategies across varying market conditions makes our institutional ecosystem especially attractive to discerning firms. Our participation at major industry events such as iFX Expo, TradeTech FX and Finance Magnates London Summit also allows potential clients to see our capabilities in action and engage directly with our teams.
How does ATFX Connect’s multi-asset capability translate into practical advantages?
Multi-asset capability is fundamentally about capital efficiency and operational simplicity. Clients trading FX alongside indices, commodities, or precious metals benefit from consolidated margining, exposure management, and streamlined reporting. For example, a client running FX strategies alongside gold or energy exposure gains from unified and clearer risk oversight and more efficient capital usage compared to managing fragmented execution across multiple providers.
In what ways does your liquidity pool construction improve the trading experience?
We combine Tier 1 bank and non-bank liquidity alongside somewhat unique pricing to build resilient and diversified liquidity pools. This reduces reliance on any single source and helps maintain depth and pricing quality across different market scenarios. In practice, this translates into more consistent performance during fast markets, events, and naturally more illiquid periods.
Can you explain how your Principal, Agency and Prime access account structures are designed?
Our account structures are built around transparency, flexibility and interoperability. Clients trade via one or more of our market access solutions on terms calibrated to their strategy profile, liquidity usage, and historical trading behaviour, always with a long-term relationship perspective in mind.
Our agency prime brokerage framework can offer execution efficiencies compared to traditional one-to-one margin structures, while maintaining disciplined and robust risk controls.
How does ATFX Connect support more complex or high-touch strategies?
Certain asset classes, particularly precious metals or less liquid FX pairs, require closer coordination between liquidity, risk, and execution teams. We support these strategies through tailored liquidity streams, high-touch execution where appropriate, and ongoing dialogue with clients around market conditions, execution timing and risk considerations.
Our bespoke liquidity and competitive spreads are delivered via flexible multi-access platforms, including integrations with technology hubs, ensuring clients receive the expert support needed for sophisticated trading needs.
What role does your technology stack and connectivity play in differentiation?
Technology is an enabler rather than the end goal. Low-latency connectivity, FIX API access, and platform flexibility are essential foundations, but the real differentiation lies in how technology supports execution quality, transparency, and effective risk control.
We focus on deploying advanced technology solutions that directly enhance client outcomes, such as optimizing our liquidity solutions, reducing latency, and enabling flexible integration with client systems. This pragmatic approach ensures that technology serves as a powerful tool to improve performance and risk control rather than being pursued for its own sake.
How are you leveraging data and analytics internally?
We analyse execution and pricing data to assess liquidity performance, slippage, and fill quality on an ongoing basis. This informs how we allocate liquidity, manage risk, and advise clients on execution strategies.
Data is also increasingly valuable in helping clients better understand their own trading behaviour and performance over time.
In what ways do your global teams leverage local expertise?
Our global reach is supported by experienced local Sales and Business Development teams that combine international scale with deep regional understanding. These teams bring decades of experience in FX, liquidity solutions, risk management, and client engagement.
This local presence means we can interpret regional market structure, regulatory nuances, and client behaviour with context that matters. Our sales professionals are not only well versed in global product capabilities, but they also understand how local trading practices, regulatory regimes, and evolving market dynamics shape Institutional client needs. This becomes increasingly important as institutional participation grows in emerging markets.
What is your perspective on digital assets and crypto?
Digital assets continue to evolve, and institutional interest is clearly on the rise. Long-term adoption will be driven less by speculative activity and more by regulation, custody solutions, and market infrastructure.
Over time, we expect elements of digital asset technology to influence broader market structure beyond crypto markets alone. At ATFX Connect, we are actively monitoring these developments to understand how blockchain and related technologies might enhance institutional liquidity, settlement processes, and risk management in the future.
ATFX Connect continues to receive industry recognition. What do those awards represent?
Delivering consistent, high-quality service and innovative, tailored solutions has always been central to our approach. As a result, we have been recognised by industry peers through awards such as the “Outstanding FX Liquidity Provider” at FinanceFeeds Awards 2025 and “Best B2B Liquidity Provider (Prime of Prime)” at FMLS 2025 and Best B2B Liquidity Provider APAC award by UF Awards 2025.
These awards represent a strong endorsement of our long-term commitment to excellence, innovation, and client-centric service. They demonstrate the trust and confidence that both our clients and industry peers place in ATFX Connect.
In the institutional space, where clients are typically conservative in counterparty selection, value consistency and credibility, such recognition reflects our proven track record and enduring dedication to delivering reliable, high-quality services.
What key initiatives are planned for the next phase of growth?
Our priorities include deepening multi-asset capabilities, enhancing execution quality through data-driven liquidity optimisation, and expanding our institutional footprint in regions where capital markets are developing rapidly. Our focus remains on sustainable growth built on long-term relationships with institutional clients, liquidity partners, and technology providers, rather than volume for its own sake. We are also focused on strengthening our technology stack and connectivity to ensure clients can access our liquidity seamlessly across venues and asset classes.
