Influential foreign exchange trading venues that act as the reference price for currencies are facing a battle to maintain lucrative charges for their market data feeds, as growing competition and declining trading volumes threaten their position.

Regulators in both the US and Europe have been closely scrutinising the amounts charged by stock exchanges for market data in recent years and the cost has sparked a fierce struggle between clients and trading platforms. Data charges in currency markets have received much less attention, partly because profits have been big enough to distract from this cost and because of less stringent regulatory requirements.

However now some FX trading customers are pushing back against these high costs and many are voting with their feet. This presents a challenge for the “Big Two” incumbent platforms, CME-owned EBS Market and Refinitiv’s Matching, which currently act as key market data providers for currencies. Both face an uncomfortable problem: how to keep charging top prices for information about exchange rates if the majority of the market trades elsewhere.