Asia Risk 15: Interdealer brokers in quest for deeper liquidity

Interdealer brokers have continued to build ever-deeper pools of liquidity in Asian markets as they have forged profitable businesses from Asia’s fragmented economies. While moves to electronic platforms are gaining momentum, relationships are still critical for price discovery. Toby Garrod reports

Few of today’s largest interdealer brokers anticipated the wealth of opportunity that would open up around them in the region following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. “Until recently, Asia had been a marginal area for Western interdealer brokers (IDBs) because of the fragmented structure of the market, the ability to consolidate liquidity and the fact that operational gearing in Asia is quite high because you are running like-for-like infrastructure in multiple centres,” says Donald