TMX Atrium, a provider of infrastructure solutions for the financial community, has upgraded its connectivity to Knight Hotspot FX, in response to client demand.

Since 2010, TMX Atrium has provided low latency connectivity to Knight Hotspot FX, one of the original FX ECNs (electronic communications networks).

“As demand for our FX capabilities increases we are confident that TMX Atrium provides the necessary bandwidth both now and in the future as FX volumes grow rapidly,” said John Miesner, managing director and head of global sales at Knight Hotspot FX. “TMX Atrium’s infrastructure upgrades enable clients utilizing their services to access Knight Hotspot FX from North America, Europe and Russia and take advantage of our full range of products and services.”

Hotspot FX’s FX ECN enables hedge funds, commodity trading advisors (CTAs), corporate treasuries, and institutional asset managers, model to gain full market transparency and greater control of the trading process, better trade execution and lower execution costs.

Electronic trading is already standard operating procedure for investors and many large corporations in the U.S. FX market, but even in the United States electronic trading platforms managed to expand their customer bases last year by meaningful margins, according to Greenwich Associates.

The share of U.S. market partici¬pants trading foreign exchange electronically increased to 82% in 2012 from 76% in 2011. Electronic platforms also gained a few new customers in the United Kingdom, where the share of institutions and companies trading FX electronically increased to 82% from 80%, and in continental Europe, where the share of market participants executing trades electronically increased to 75% from 73%.

Greenwich Associates expects e-trading volumes to return to a growth trajectory as foreign exchange trading regains steam and market participants continue dropping the telephone for screen-based execution. Among users of e-trading, the average share of FX transactions executed via phone calls between market participants and dealers declined to 23% of total volume in 2012 from 27% in 2011.

In terms of overall foreign exchange trading volumes, 2013 got off to a strong start, according to Greenwich Associates consultant Peter D’Amario. “If this level of activity holds, we would expect to see meaningful increases in both the absolute volumes executed through online systems this year and in the share of overall marketplace trading volumes executed electronically.”

Connectivity to Hotspot is from the TMX Atrium hub at New York 4 and enables Hotspot participants to communicate and trade with TMX Atrium’s ever-growing number of buy and sell side participants trading across the full range of asset classes.

“Our network has been designed to scale with the growing demands of FX trading,” said Emmanuel Carjat, managing director of TMX Atrium. “This capability complements the steady increase in demand for access to FX trading locations such as Hotspot. Extending partnerships with firms such as Hotspot ensures that we continue to offer our clients a wide range of choice of trading venues.”