EBS (Electronic Broking Services) was created by a partnership of the world's largest foreign exchange market making banks. Approximately USD 125 billion in spot foreign exchange transaction, 700,000 oz in gold and 7 million oz in silver is traded every day over the EBS Spot Dealing System. It was created in 1990 to challenge Reuters' threatened monopoly in interbank spot foreign exchange and provide effective competition.

EBS's closest competitor is Reuters Dealing 3000 Spot Matching (aka D2), which was launched after EBS. The decision by an FX trader whether to use EBS or Reuters D2 is driven largely by currency pair. In practice, EBS is used mainly for EUR/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, USD/CHF and EUR/CHF, and Reuters D2 is used for all other interbank currency pairs. In June 2004, EBS announced that it was adding support for AUD/USD and USD/CAD. However, EBS had been supporting AUD/USD and USD/CAD for many years, since even before the launch of Reuters D2, so there was in fact no change. It was simply a marketing stunt by EBS to encourage traders to use EBS for these two currency pairs instead of Reuters D2. This had limited success in that liquidity in these two currency pairs in EBS has improved significantly, although not to the same level as Reuters D2.

Shareholders:

• ABN AMRO
• JP Morgan Chase
• Bank of America
• Lehman Brothers
• Barclays
• Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken
• Citigroup
• The Minex Corporation (a consortium of Japanese banks, voice brokers and Telerate)
• Commerzbank
• The Royal Bank of Scotland
• Credit Suisse First Boston
• UBS
• HSBC

ICAP Plc, the world's largest broker of transactions between banks, agreed in 2006 to buy EBS.^*

External links

• Website
• List of supported currency pairs in EBS and Reuters D2