Fintech start-up of the year: BestX

At the top-left of the screen is a set of five traffic-light indicators, summarising the execution of a large spot foreign exchange trade. It’s good news – four of the lights are green, one yellow.

The rest of the dashboard explains why: a set of speedometers show how quickly the order was filled on average, along with the risk of signalling the trade to other market participants; a bar graph shows the actual and expected impact the trade had on the market; a more complex chart shows the progress of the order, with volume increasing cumulatively in the background and circles showing how execution steadily switched from passive to aggressive as minutes passed.

This is a demo, showing some of the ways clients of BestX can track the quality of their foreign exchange execution, and users say it is far richer than anything available before the firm launched in 2016.