Best Real Money Platform 2026

As noted into our introduction, there was demand after last year’s awards to provide more granularity, specifically in terms of client segments. This is obviously a fluid concept – where does real money end and hedge fund money start for example? – but allowing for some crossover, we will start with the real money segment.

This part of the business has historically been about workflow and administration, with some honourable exceptions, FX has not figured highly in some firms’ plans, but that is changing. As more funds start to pay attention to their FX requirements, they will demand more sophisticated tools and services, and that puts, perhaps more clients in play.

That said, this remains a very conservative segment, where existing providers often have to do something wrong to be seriously challenged, however more doors are opening to different providers, if they are ready to take the step.

If they are, however, they will have to get around one of the giants in this space, State Street. We should stress, this award is not about FX Connect, while it may be owned by the bank, it is a different business for our purposes, but the fact that there is easy connectivity and expertise “in-house” clearly helps.

Rather, this award is about how the bank has taken what were widely recognised as excellent administrative products and services, and overlaid them with great execution tools. We discuss the analytics elsewhere in this article, but the bank has clearly tapped into its expertise and sweet spot with real money to develop a set of algo execution tools that not only meet their requirements, but on occasion exceed them, providing clients customised tools or strategies where required.

It serves to highlight how State Street has upped its game with its core client base that the advances in its algo suite put it into contention for our best algos award, something that probably was not on the horizon just a couple of year ago. The portfolio parameterisation tools are excellent, as is the ability to front load (or otherwise) the order execution path by modelling the efficient frontier. Equally, the platform streams a live price for the balance of an execution, as well as analysis as to how such a trade would impact their final outcome.

The real money world has become a much more competitive field for FX banks over the past few years, thanks to customers showing more interest in FX and more banks seeing the value of adding that type of flow to the franchise. The good news is that State Street has responded and placed itself at the forefront of service providers, through innovation and the clever integration of more sophisticated execution tools.