e-FX in 2026: Bringing the future into focus – e-Forex

As 2026 kicks off, the only topics of conversation seemingly involve stablecoins, blockchain, and AI. 2025 delivered plenty of celebratory news on the regulatory front (GENIUS Act, MiCA), justifying the enthusiasm market observers have for digital assets. 

Stablecoins are increasingly viewed as substitutes for fiat and crypto payments, with their ability to bypass high transaction fees in focus.

Blockchain adoption, meanwhile, continues to grow. Security use cases aside, interoperability is in focus as digital market infrastructure creeps into traditional markets. 2036 could be the year asset tokenisation gains ground and goes mainstream.

But what about the less celebrated, yet vital, aspects of the FX markets? We surveyed five experts for their takes on everything from regulation to swaps to market growth. 

Here’s what they reckon 2026 has in store for us.

John Crisp, Head of FX Data Product & Strategy at TraditionData, on alpha generation, technology adoption, electronic workflows, and advanced data solutions

Businesses will increasingly look to use OTC flow and positioning data to complement price data in their search for additional alpha this year. Firms will look to datasets such as end-of-day position sizes and volumes of intraday trading activity broken down by some segmentation, with that segmentation allowing for greater inference from the data.

Electronic trading in NDF, onshore, and frontier currency markets will continue to evolve. This shift will be driven less by new venue innovation and more by advances in price construction by liquidity providers. 

As pricing engines and the data that fuels them become more robust, client workflows will evolve along a spectrum from RFQ toward RFS and streaming models, improving execution efficiency while preserving control in less-liquid markets.

There will be more nuance in the curation of liquidity. This will be seen both in SOR (Smart Order Routing) and in trading venues offering more customised liquidity pools, helping to reduce market impact. Recent advances in AI will be a key enabler, allowing liquidity provider selection to be dynamically tailored to execution objectives, prevailing market conditions, and the specific instrument being traded.

Esteban Mora, Group Chief Technology Officer, 26 Degrees GLOBAL Markets, on liquidity provisioning, analytics, and manager role evolution.

Liquidity pool curation will increasingly prioritize the effective economics of all trading activity over simple headline spreads this year. This requires measuring not just the cost of entry, but the cost of holding onto risk. The effective spread quantifies a broker’s cost of liquidity at the point of entry and must account for all fills, rejects, latency, and execution friction. However, effective spread alone is insufficient. The mark-out decay of a liquidity pool can quantify post-execution price drift and highlight aggressive LP behaviours, such as sub-optimal or predatory hedging.This interplay can reveal the true costs of executing within any given liquidity pool. Tight spreads generated by overly aggressive skews may not necessarily be in the favour of the broker and must also be evaluated carefully. 

While they appear attractive, they may cause the broker to experience adverse selection of trades, especially in an aggregated environment. In certain contexts, a higher effective spread with more fidelity to a neutral rate may provide a more efficient hedge. However, controlled skews can become valuable in offsetting concentrated client flow, aligning inbound pricing with the true risk profile of client flows.

Curation, therefore, revolves around optimizing both spreads and market impact. By heavily segmenting LPs by decay-adjusted performance, brokers can identify impactful behaviours and prioritize liquidity providers who are delivering an efficient transfer of risk, a dynamic that 26 Degrees fully supports. This not only preserves the broker’s P&L but also provides a stable partnership for the long term, rather than optimizing for the optics of top-of-book spread.

In 2026, liquidity analytics will continue to transition from a passive, post-trade reporting layer to a real-time control system. This requires an architectural leap beyond any batch-based systems, to a streaming analytic pipeline with a live, holistic view of liquidity performance. Effectively, we are replacing “analytics you look at” with “analytics that drive the machine.”

Critically for 26 Degrees, this capability has enabled event-driven automation. This allows for a movement away from manual tuning toward a system that can curate liquidity as risk and market conditions shift in milliseconds. 

This has a natural consequence of tightening the relationship between analytics and execution. It becomes a closed feedback loop where data is no longer just an output, but a direct input for pricing and hedging engines.This can ensure a consistent quality of liquidity, as both the broker and the liquidity provider can optimize without delays in intervention. Of course, a robust technological system is needed for this benefit to be fully realised.

In terms of the evolution of the liquidity manager’s role in 2026, the natural next step involves a transition away from an operational gatekeeper to a technical Product Owner of the liquidity stack. The manager must design the decision logic itself, quantifying and codifying what was previously a discretionary interpretation. This attempts to capture the “art” of liquidity management into explicit, repeatable steps.

This demands a shift towards an overall system architecture where the manager becomes a translator between commercial strategy and quantitative and technological development. While the system must be flexible enough for strategic human override, the core objective is to drive higher profitability while reducing daily operational burden. 

The manager must define the boundaries and allow the system to optimize dynamically within them. Appropriate oversight and governance frameworks are essential when deploying these types of automated processes. This, along with technical prowess, is an area where companies will set themselves apart in the long term.

The manager’s workflow can therefore shift to proactive R&D over reactive tuning. As a system absorbs more of the load, the manager can focus on controlled experiments to further iterate on the system’s logical and commercial design. This elevates the manager to the position of architect, continuously refining the broker’s “edge”.

Rahul Gupta, Senior Director, FX Products, CME Group, on what we can expect with OTC and listed FX markets evolving together

A confluence of catalysts, including capital impacts for banks and margin impacts for buyside clients, has helped underpin continued growth in the adoption of FX futures; 2025 saw all-time records in terms of both the total number of large open interest holders and in gross open asset manager positions. 

As the futures market continues to grow, so does client demand to more readily connect futures with the OTC market. Recent enhancements to CME Group’s FX futures market include the addition of new currency pairs with SGD, THB, and IDR, all added in 2025, and the provision of regionally relevant snapshots for daily valuations, including 4 pm London, 4 pm New York, and 3 pm Tokyo. 

Yet the ability to truly bridge the OTC and FX futures markets is arguably the most important area of development, and CME Group has made a concerted effort to more closely align these markets through three key initiatives. Each of these represents areas where we expect further evolution throughout 2026.

CME Group’s FX Spot+, its next-generation all-to-all spot marketplace launched in 2025, enables seamless connectivity between the futures and OTC marketplaces, and allows spot traders to access futures liquidity and vice versa. 

We have extended the number of currency pairs available to trade and have made enhancements to the maximum order sizes to allow larger orders on the back of client demand. 

As the ecosystem for Spot+ continues to grow, this should be a very interesting market to watch in 2026 as traditional OTC participants incorporate the two-fold benefits of being able to access futures liquidity for the first time, while also being able to distribute their OTC pricing to the entirety of the futures market.

FX EFRP volumes almost doubled year-on-year in 2025, with volumes up 97% and with activity across ~30 currency pairs. As more liquidity providers embrace and automate their support of this workflow, we expect a continued expansion of client adoption, thereby truly evolving the FX market by allowing buyside clients to achieve capital and margin efficiencies of central clearing whilst leaning on bilateral, relationship-based OTC pricing.

We’re also focused on growing FX Link as a leading centralised venue for market participants to manage spot to forward basis risk through cleared futures. 

We see increased demand for the solution from Bank STIR desks, since it acts as a unique, capital-efficient swaps order book that truly separates liquidity from credit, in addition to providing a tool for participants to optimise the margin associated with their centrally-cleared futures and options risk.

Peer Joost, CEO, DIGITEC, on the FX Swaps market in 2026

During 2025, we saw the FX Swaps market continue to adopt electronic trading, with the majority of firms trying to automate large parts of their trading workflows to increase speed and efficiency, and to scale their FX businesses. We expect this to continue in 2026, as clients look to trade FX Swaps in more currencies and tenors. Banks can only support these client demands by implementing technology solutions, where workflows are automated in data, pricing, distribution, and settlement. Without investing in technology, these banks risk being replaced by their competitors.

The FX Swaps market is probably 15 years behind Spot in the use of technology, but it is rapidly evolving to a more electronic structure. The combination of client demand for FX Swaps, advances in pricing technology, and more available data has driven volumes up, and we expect this growth to continue in 2026. 

Over the last two years, some firms have started to migrate from using voice brokers to interdealer venues like 360T SUN and LSEG Forwards Matching. To automate these workflows, we developed D3 OMS, which enables FX Swaps traders to efficiently place and actively manage orders on interdealer venues. 

We expect this migration to continue and for interdealer volumes to increase as a result, driven in part by our pipeline of onboarding banks. These advances in the interdealer market will flow down to Bank-to-Client markets as the management of FX Swaps risk improves.

Another key theme for 2026 is the availability of more data. Pricing engines like D3 quickly construct curves using data from many different sources. As interbank FX Swaps venues attract more volume, the resulting core trading data will further enhance pricing accuracy.

Creating accurate curves across all relevant currency pairs will increasingly become the key differentiator for market makers to increase their P&L and win additional business.

Mattias Palm, Head of triReduce FX and Commodities, OSTTRA, on post-trade trends

In 2026, automation in post-trade FX will move beyond simply speeding up existing steps and instead focus on reducing how many steps are needed in the first place. The most meaningful change will be the wider adoption of workflow orchestration, where confirmation, matching, settlement preparation, netting, and optimisation are managed as one continuous process rather than a series of handoffs between systems.

Firms will increasingly rely on automated routing that can decide, in real time, whether a trade is best handled bilaterally, through a netting service, or via clearing, where available. This will be particularly important as portfolios become more diverse and less centred on a single currency. Automation will also extend to lifecycle events, such as rollovers and amendments, which today still generate a disproportionate amount of manual work.

Crucially, these advances will not require wholesale system replacement. The focus will be on layering automation on top of existing infrastructure, allowing firms to modernise at a controlled pace while keeping operational risk in check.

The biggest bottlenecks in post-trade FX remain exceptions, fragmentation, and capital inefficiency. Even highly automated desks still spend significant time resolving breaks caused by inconsistent data, late allocations, or mismatched settlement instructions.

In 2026, these issues will increasingly be addressed through greater standardisation and centralisation. Using common data models and shared services reduces the scope for disagreement between counterparties. At the same time, portfolio-level tools such as netting, compression, and optimisation will be used more systematically to reduce the sheer number of settlements and exposures firms need to manage.

Another long-standing pain point is the mismatch between 24-hour FX trading and once-a-day settlement cycles. While this will not disappear overnight, incremental progress toward more flexible and, eventually, near real-time settlement models will ease liquidity pressures and reduce operational stress during periods of volatility.

Data will become the primary control mechanism in post-trade FX. Rather than relying on end-of-day checks, firms will use analytics to monitor risk, settlement readiness, and operational health continuously.

In practical terms, this means using historical and real-time data to predict where breaks are likely to occur, flagging potential issues before they become costly problems. For example, analytics can highlight counterparties or currency pairs that consistently generate exceptions, allowing firms to address root causes rather than repeatedly fixing symptoms.

Supervision will also become more proactive. Managers will have clearer, simpler dashboards showing exposures, settlement status, and liquidity usage across the entire FX portfolio. This shift from reactive reporting to forward-looking insight will be essential as trading volumes grow and portfolios become more complex.

Mattias Palm on overall e-FX market trends this year

Asia-Pacific will continue to be a major growth engine for e-FX in 2026. Markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong benefit from deep liquidity, strong regulatory engagement, and active experimentation with new settlement and clearing models. India is also becoming more significant as local market infrastructure develops and participation broadens.

In Europe, growth will be driven less by new volumes and more by structural change. Preparations for shorter settlement cycles and ongoing regulatory reform will push firms to upgrade post-trade processes, increasing demand for electronic and automated solutions. 

The Americas will remain dominant in absolute terms, but growth there is likely to be more incremental, focused on optimisation and resilience rather than expansion into entirely new markets.

Frontier and emerging markets will see steady, if uneven, progress in electronic FX trading. The key development will not be a sudden surge in volumes, but improved access and reliability. More trades will be confirmed and settled electronically, reducing reliance on manual processes that increase risk and cost.

As confidence grows, these markets will also benefit from better risk management tools, including payment versus payment mechanisms and portfolio optimisation services that make it easier for global firms to participate without taking on disproportionate operational risk. 

Over time, this will support deeper liquidity and more consistent pricing, even if these markets remain less standardised than major currency pairs.

FX technology hotspots are most likely to emerge where regulation, market demand, and technical capability intersect. These point to centres such as London, Singapore, New York, and parts of continental Europe.

Innovation in these hubs will focus on interoperability rather than disruption for its own sake. New solutions will be designed to work alongside existing systems, enabling tokenised cash, digital settlement assets, and programmable workflows without forcing firms to abandon proven infrastructure.

Ultimately, the most successful innovations will be those that quietly remove friction from the post-trade process, lowering cost and risk without adding complexity. In a market as large and interconnected as FX, progress will come from collaboration and integration, not from isolated, stand-alone solutions.