Deutsche pinches e-trading title from UBS

The German bank was also favourite among bank respondents in the survey, while investors awarded UBS the top spot and corporate clients rated Barclays Capital in first place.

Andy Coyne, head of global liquidity solutions at Deutsche Bank in London, said that several factors are behind its success. "Deutsche uses its own technology to create a unique offering for the professional user – the key benefit for us is that we can control our own direction. That alone is not enough to be top; we provide a unique blend of price, liquidity and relationship," he told FX Week.

Clients are continuing to use single-bank platforms and growth in this area means they are outperforming their multi-bank counterparts, he said. "The multi-bank space is becoming increasingly crowded and no clear winners have yet emerged. Ultimately, the client will continue to have even more choice about how they can access Deutsche's liquidity."

Coyne said that e-trading is important to Deutsche because of the bank's place in the market as a liquidity provider. "As the FX market segments into what looks more and more like a wholesale/commercial model, those banks wanting to serve and grow their FX client base can do so by tapping into our liquidity," he added.

Meanwhile, FXall retained its title as best-multi-bank portal. Mark Warms, global marketing manager of FXall in London, said the portal's functionality goes beyond pricing to give clients access to research and straight-through processing. FXall focuses on four major client sectors – asset managers, active traders, multinational corporations and brokers/banks – and was rated the best multi-bank portal by two sectors in FX Week's survey – corporates and investors. Banks, however, nominated Currenex as their favoured portal. Richard Hartheimer, managing director for Currenex in London, said it offers banks "excellent non-correlated deal flow" in that it has diverse clients – corporates, funds, arcades and trading aggregators.

"Furthermore, we protect banks; our Sniper Protection is a key example of this, where we provide our banks with optional controls to limit their streaming exposure." Hartheimer said that banks have complete control over who they provide pricing to and the pricing they provide. "Banks can provide customised prices for each client and can provide different prices depending on the size of the business."