US wholesale broker and market operator GFI Group has indicated an expansion of electronic trading services with the appointment of James Toffey as global head of electronic markets – a new position in the firm.
Toffey will be responsible for growing GFI’s services as a global operator of electronic marketplaces for cash and derivatives products. Previously, he developed electronic markets for fixed income and equities as president and CEO of Tradeweb Markets, a joint venture with four global banks he set up in 1997.
Speaking to theTRADEnews.com, Toffey said GFI’s entrepreneurial spirit and proprietary technology would mark the firm as a leader in the changing electronic trading environment. GFI has positioned itself as a future operator of swap execution facilities (SEFs), which Toffey said would be expanded with new products and markets in the future.
“Technology will be an important ingredient in this emerging SEF environment and GFI’s proprietary technology, which is widely used in the market, can be used in a variety of ways, so the company is well placed to develop new products and services,” Toffey said.
Specifically, he said the need to develop cross asset-class electronic offerings to traders would be a major area of future development for GFI.
“To provide the most powerful trading solutions and strategies for clients we’ll need to stitch together cash, derivatives and futures as a whole market solution and we see GFI being a market leader in that approach,” he said.
GFI provides brokerage services, market data, trading platform and analytics software products to institutional clients in markets for a range of fixed income, financial, equity and commodity instruments. Earlier this year, GFI filed with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to open the GFI Futures Exchange, a designated contract market.