Singapore Unseats Japan as Asia’s Largest FX Hub

Singapore overtook Japan as Asia’s biggest foreign-exchange center for the first time as trading surged in the past three years, the city’s central bank said, citing a survey by the Bank for International Settlements.

The city’s average daily foreign-exchange volume increased 44 percent to $383 billion as of April from $266 billion in the same month in 2010, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement yesterday. The average interest-rate derivatives volume climbed 6 percent to $37 billion over the same period, the highest in the region after Japan, it said.

“Singapore has definitely established itself as a hub for foreign-exchange trading,” Khoon Goh, a senior currency strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ) in Singapore, said before the release of the statement. “Part of this emergence is due to the increasing importance of Asian currencies, and Singapore’s time zone is well-suited for that.”

The increase in ranking puts Singapore just behind the U.K. and U.S. in the $6.67 trillion global currencies trading market, according to the Bank for International Settlements or BIS. The city’s foreign-exchange market expanded as the government offered incentives to boost its financial markets, which also led to a surge in the nation’s fund management industry, where more than 500 asset managers oversee about $1.1 trillion.

Bloomberg

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