Introduction

Citi, one of the world’s leading global banks, operates at the forefront of electronic foreign exchange trading, where speed, scalability, and reliability are critical to maintaining competitiveness. As the accelerated electronification of FX markets and client demand for real-time pricing intensified, Citi partnered with Rapid Addition to enhance its trading infrastructure and strengthen its position in the rapidly evolving FX e-trading landscape.

Problem

Citi needed to distribute thousands of FX price updates per second to a large global client base while handling unpredictable data volumes driven by market volatility. Furthermore, due to the two-sided nature of FX quotes and the richness of their instrument and rate fields, the size of each quote message presented additional dissemination challenges. Citi’s existing infrastructure struggled to keep pace, particularly during periods of market stress, resulting in latency and delays in updating quotes.

This created a material business risk, including exposure to adverse selection, where trades were executed against stale prices. At the same time, Citi required infrastructure capable of handling hundreds of thousands of messages per second via FIX, while maintaining low latency, high throughput, and strict regulatory compliance, all without excessive hardware scaling. A key requirement was achieving targeted end-to-end processing times to position Citi as a market leader.

Solution

Citi integrated Rapid Addition’s FIX Engine and RA Hub platform into its FX pricing and distribution architecture. Supporting connectivity across global co-location hubs including London, New York, Tokyo, and Singapore, the solution provided a high-performance, scalable foundation for real-time price distribution.

Rapid Addition’s technology enabled Citi to efficiently distribute large volumes of pricing data via FIX, while supporting seamless client onboarding and order routing. The platform’s low-latency performance and flexible architecture allowed Citi to integrate its proprietary pricing engines, execution algorithms, and liquidity tools, creating a highly optimised and scalable electronic FX trading environment.

Results

The new platform significantly enhanced Citi’s ability to process and distribute high-frequency FX pricing data, exceeding performance requirements and delivering faster, more consistent quote updates. This reduced exposure to stale pricing and improved execution quality for clients. Independent benchmarking further confirmed that performance limits were driven by network capacity rather than the platform itself, demonstrating the scalability of the solution.

Citi also achieved substantial infrastructure efficiencies, including a reduction in server footprint of approximately 70%, while improving scalability and regulatory compliance. The improved performance, stability, and flexibility strengthened Citi’s competitive position in electronic FX trading and enabled it to scale with growing market demand.

Next Steps

Rapid Addition’s solution provides Citi with the flexibility to focus on other areas, whether that be further enhancing API-based trading, expanding algorithmic execution capabilities, or continuing to optimise pricing and liquidity distribution.