Mauritius is strengthening its positioning as a regional financial hub with Bloomberg holding a session to demonstrate its commitment towards the island economy, and the larger continent, by tailoring its Fixed Income (FI) and Foreign Exchange (FX) products to African markets.
Bloomberg held its first Mauritius Focus Day at the Labourdonnais Waterfront Hotel on September 15, 2014 where Bloomberg’s emerging market specialists demonstrated the capabilities of their terminal in the presence of several Mauritian currency professionals.
This premier event included some key sessions on FI, FX Derivatives and FX products for the local market.
Through this event, Bloomberg wanted to demonstrate its high threshold of commitment, not only towards Mauritius but also towards Africa, displaying its ability to customize products, offer advertorial products and debit customer service.
Bloomberg, which already boasts seven offices in Sub-Saharan Africa, has decided to move its London office to Dubai to gain proximity to Africa and boost its know-how of the continent.
Borja Uya, Account Manager for Mauritius, who spoke about FI Analytics on Bloomberg, said that their FI platform provides a single integrated system that gives end-to-end support to the fixed income offering.
As Bloomberg hosts government FI statistics for all countries, it offers the opportunity to look up historical data and identify trends.
One of the benefits of the fixed income platform, which could be of great advantage to Mauritius, is that it provides free price coverage, allowing companies to monitor the current market data with an option to send prices to the company’s clients every day.
In addition, Bloomberg is trying to work with banks in Mauritius to get their feedback and encourage them to move to the FX platform.
“Basically, as the FX offering is showing robust growth in the secondary market, we are here to provide tools to perform analysis and confirm all trades with banks. It is the first event we have held here and it was positively received with many people attending the session,” Borja Uya told AfricaMoney.
Gaurav Kapoor, Bloomberg FX Application Specialist, spoke about FX Derivatives & Analytics on Bloomberg.
He stated that FX players in the market pull data out and input it in the functionalities of the Bloomberg platform.
With the Bloomberg Correlation-Weighted currency indices, the correlation gets updated every day and companies can track their chosen currency more easily.
He mentioned that the platform helps companies exploit the opportunity to raise money in foreign currency and then swap it in a base currency.
According to him, the FX Forecast, which comprises a panel of analysts who contribute their forecasts, is important because it is a way to track a specific analyst and is a marketing tool for them as well.
Max Comparetti, Bloomberg FXET Specialist, spoke on Bloomberg Dealing for FX markets and gave an overview of the FX Electronic trading product on Bloomberg’s platform.
“This is the first FX and FI event we are holding in Mauritius. We already did a series of events in Africa so we came to Mauritius to demonstrate the growth of the FX platform, which has been pretty substantial over the last years,” Max Comparetti told AfricaMoney.
“We are happy to bring in some competition to the FX market in Mauritius, to offer alternative platforms to the ones being used in Mauritius and provide cost-efficient offerings for banks to transact FX and analyze currency markets on the same platform,” Comparetti added.
In the last few years, Bloomberg has invested a lot of money in the FX space, including FX analytics and trading, honing its capabilities to allow it to enter more markets and compete successfully.
- By Marie-Lorry Coret and Cecilia Samoisi
Image (Cecilia Samoisi): Through this event, Bloomberg wanted to demonstrate its high threshold of commitment, not only towards Mauritius but also towards Africa, displaying its ability to customize Fixed Income (FI) and Foreign Exchange (FX) products to African markets.
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