Citi Rolls Out Retail Price Improvement in Mexico

Citi has launched an order facilitation mechanism platform which will provide full penny price improvement to retail investors in Mexico.

For the first time in Latin America, the new platform known as RTT (Retail Price Improvement), will allow institutional investors to interact with retail flow, which facilitates price improvements for both retail and institutional clients, the brokerage firm said.

“Retail Price Improvement will enhance trading for the Mexican investment community and generate significant contributions to the economy,” said Eduardo Navarro, CEO of Banamex-Accival, a wholly owned subsidiary of Citi, in today’s announcement. “With the introduction of Rπ, our local and foreign investor clients will continue to benefit from our full suite of equities trading solutions.”

By interacting with retail flow and client orders, institutional clients have the opportunity to improve pricing on their execution between the bid and offer.

Local and international clients in Latin America will benefit from increased liquidity by bringing the retail and institutional orders through the innovative platform, according to Young Kang, global head of Algorithmic Products at Citi in a statement. “We are continuing to see a demand from international clients for more product such as RTT as Citi expands its global footprint in the region,” Kang added in the release.

RTT is expected to increase liquidity at the exchange by working in conjunction with other initiatives, both platform and product related.“Leveraging our world-class platform, we strongly believe that RTT, along with our breadth of product enhancements at the exchange level, will help improve liquidity and provide a unique opportunity for our clients,” said Alfredo Guillien, COO for the equity markets at the Mexico Exchange[known as Bolsa Mexicana de Valores or BMV] “This will also encourage foreign institutional flow into Mexico and enhance our ability to reach both local and foreign investors,” he added.

Citi said the launch of RTT underscores its commitment to Latin American financial markets, noting that it follows closely Citi’s launch in Brazil of Total Touch, a block electronic execution platform.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio