While large corporates are able to enjoy the benefits of tighter pricing warranted by the liquidity in our markets, charges recovered from smaller customers do not appear to be justified by higher cost of processing / warehousing small ticket transactions. The FX-Retail platform was introduced in a bid to shift price discovery to an automated platform.
Especially the market for corporate bonds is growing dynamically, albeit from rather low levels (due to the traditional dominance of bank credit in corporate finance in most countries of the euro area). In terms of overall volumes, the corporate bond market more than doubled between the first half of 1998 and the first half of this year.