FXSpotstream names Ward as new CEO

The former global head of EBS, Jeff Ward, will become chief executive of FXSpotstream from next year, the trading platform has announced.

Ward will assume the role from the beginning of January, taking over from Tom San Pietro who has served as interim CEO for the past eight months and continues in his role as chief technology officer.

“Following an extensive and rigorous search, the board is highly confident that Jeff’s exceptional leadership skills, strategic insights and deep industry knowledge make him the ideal choice to drive the company’s continued growth, as well as strengthen its partnerships and build key new relationships,” said Mark Meredith, board chair of FXSpotstream and global head of FX e-trading and algorithmic execution at Citi.

Ward will join FXSpotstream having spent 18 years at EBS where he helped oversee the launch of its electronic non-deliverable forwards business and managed its migration from Nex Group to CME in 2018.

He will leave EBS in September after its parent group, CME Group, announced the appointment of Paul Houston as the head of its entire FX business across both cash and derivatives.

FXSpotstream was launched over 11 years ago as a bank-backed spot FX price aggregation service, with the aim of disrupting the public trading venues like EBS and (formerly) Reuters.

It initially pitched itself as a market utility whereby clients could place orders through a single API connection and have them routed to their chosen liquidity provider. It would also charge zero brokerage fees either to its clients or to liquidity banks.

In December 2021, it made its API available to all of its liquidity banks’ spot FX algos. The result was a huge jump in volumes. Average daily volume has since increased from $42 billion to $65 billion as of July 2023.

However, questions began to arise over its future business model after founder and CEO Alan Schwartz revealed he would leave in February this year. These included a possible change in its revenue structure from subscription-based to the standard brokerage-based model, but the venue decided to drop that idea.