LONDON (Reuters) - A bulk of the trading in the $6.6 trillion-a-day foreign exchange markets is expected to be on cloud technology over the next five years, according to a survey conducted by fintech firm Integral.
Two-thirds of 94 heads and senior managers in currency trading at banks and buy-side institutions, surveyed between September 2020 and January 2021, expect to adopt the secure and cost effective cloud based solutions to "a significant degree" from just 26% now.
Cloud technology, as against the widely used on-premise technology in foreign exchange trading, is hardly a new concept with companies increasingly using it to make data management more cost-effective, centralised and efficient.
Covid-19, in part, has accelerated this trend.
"As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, market participants realised that a remote working environment is not only a reality, but one that isn’t going away in the near term," Integral said in a statement.
Making remote trading secure and efficient is seen as the greatest workflow challenge currently, it said, a finding that has been echoed in other surveys by market participants in recent weeks.
In other key findings, the survey participants saw share of electronic trading over voice trading in forex markets jumping another 11% to 83% by the end of 2021.