"I am excited to join Spotex because it is bringing exciting innovations to the institutional FX market and has tremendous growth potential," said Ainsworth. "I look forward to working with a team that has deep experience in bringing technology and liquidity solutions to market."

In 2020, Spotex introduced dark streaming functionality and full-amount streams, which incorporate the firm's proprietary performance-based matching logic. In addition to several new business partnerships, it has a pipeline of additional innovations to deploy in 2021.

"We are thrilled to have Paul join Spotex at this pivotal moment in our evolution," said Spotex CEO John Miesner. "Paul's deep client relationships and market knowledge will enable us to develop new solutions with a wider set of institutional market participants."

Prior to joining Spotex, Ainsworth served for more than 15 years in key roles at a foreign exchange ECN as well as two leading FX banks. He most recently was Global Head of Sales at Euronext FX, having originally joined the Fastmatch ECN in 2015. Before that, he worked in institutional FX sales at UBS and Barclays Capital.

Spotex enables institutions to trade in a low latency ECN central limit order book (CLOB) or their own disclosed DMA liquidity pools with preferred liquidity providers. Leading FX bank and non-bank liquidity providers are connected to Spotex.

Liquidity on the Spotex ECN is differentiated by natural customer order flows from global FX brokers, which use Spotex's proprietary retail broker technology.

Clients also benefit from Spotex's multiple Prime Broker clearing model, which enables access to liquidity from multiple prime brokers without incurring additional fees and Spotex's proprietary ECN matching logic, which rewards high performing liquidity providers as well as micro-second execution speeds, and true 24/5 operation, without end-of-day shutdowns.