Citigroup is planning to join UBS with an electronic currency trading and pricing platform in Singapore, setting up systems to boost liquidity in Asia's biggest foreign exchange (FX) hub.

Singapore will become the fourth FX trading engine location for Citi, which also has systems set up in Tokyo, New York and London, the bank said yesterday.

"The expansion of our FX trading engine will also lead to a vast improvement in latency for our clients in Singapore and across much of Asia-Pacific, who prior to this would connect via Tokyo or one of our trading engines outside of the region," Mr Stuart Staley, Citi's Asia-Pacific head of markets and securities services, said.

The facility, which is slated to go live in the fourth quarter, will support 23 spot currencies including all those in the Group-of-Ten.

The planned expansion is expected to inject more liquidity into Singapore's currency market, which had US$517 billion (S$703 billion) in daily average trading volume in 2016 - higher than Hong Kong and Japan, a triennial central bank survey by the Bank for International Settlements showed.

Citi's system is also expected to support 13 deliverable emerging-market currencies.

The engine, to be built in-house, will include a proprietary pricing and hedging algorithm. The platform will also allow trading in gold and silver.

Citi was the fifth-largest currency trading firm by market share last year, with JPMorgan and UBS among the top, according to a Euromoney Institutional Investor survey.

BLOOMBERG