Three major FX venues in London deployed matching-engine upgrades in the last quarter. Most retail platforms treated it as a routine maintenance note. In practice, the tick-size behaviour, cancel latency, and price improvement logic have all shifted.
What changed under the hood
- Cancel-to-quote latency reduced by ~40% on venue A
- Minimum quote lifetime introduced on venue B
- Price-improvement auction extended by 200 microseconds on venue C
Any routing logic that has not been re-benchmarked since March is quietly making sub-optimal decisions. This is the sort of change that never generates a headline and still costs measurable basis points a month.