The LSE Directory / Data providers
Dukascopy Bank SA is a Swiss bank and online ECN broker headquartered in Geneva, offering foreign exchange, CFD, and cryptocurrency trading alongside retail and corporate banking. Its core trading venue is the SWFX Swiss Forex Marketplace, an electronic communication network that matches client orders against a pool of liquidity providers rather than dealing against clients on a market-making basis. Clients trade through JForex (desktop, web, and mobile Java-based platforms) or MetaTrader 4 and 5, with MT5 offering more than 400 instruments spanning forex, metals, and crypto CFDs; the group also runs a stock CFD platform and multi-currency banking accounts in 24 currencies. For market data and quant users specifically, Dukascopy is best known for its free Historical Data Feed: a web export tool that provides tick-by-tick bid and ask prices plus OHLC candles, from tick granularity up to monthly bars, in CSV format across forex, commodities, indices, and other instruments, widely used for backtesting outside of any brokerage relationship. Programmatic access is available through the JForex API, a Java client library with an IHistory interface for bars, ticks, and feed history that connects directly to Dukascopy's trade servers, plus FIX 4.4 and REST/WebSocket interfaces for institutional order routing and real-time data. This combination of a regulated bank's execution infrastructure with a genuinely free historical tick archive differentiates it from pure data vendors, which typically charge for tick-level history, and from most retail brokers, which do not publish raw historical ticks at all. The bank traces its origins to 1998, when a group headed by physicist Andre Duka began building trading and financial systems using quantitative methods; the firm was formally established on 2 November 2004 by Andre and Veronika Duka, who remain its majority owners, and SWFX launched in 2006. Dukascopy is regulated by FINMA both as a bank and as a securities firm, and it operates further licensed entities: Dukascopy Europe IBS AS, a Riga-based brokerage, and Dukascopy Japan K.K., a Tokyo-based Type-1 licensed broker acquired via the 2015 purchase of Alpari Japan. The group reports over 300 staff across its offices in Geneva, Riga, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and a Dukascopy Community of roughly 130,000 members. In 2014, a Swiss court found three independent asset managers who traded on Dukascopy's platform guilty of churning client accounts, and Dukascopy itself was ordered to disgorge CHF 775,000 in unlawful profit without facing criminal charges. In June 2026, Dukascopy said it became one of the first Swiss banks to launch AI-powered trading via the Model Context Protocol, letting clients connect assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude to their JForex accounts to place trades, check exposure, or set stop-loss and take-profit levels through natural-language chat commands. The feature launched on demo accounts first, with live-account support planned for summer to autumn 2026.
