The FOW Amsterdam conference will reconvene next week at a time of heightened competition in some of Europe’s key futures markets.

Panels featuring the top European exchanges and trading houses will discuss on April 10 trends in European interest rates and European equity derivatives, two hotly contested markets at the moment.

The interest rates panel will see Stelios Tselikas of ICE, Lee Bartholomew of Eurex and Mark Rogerson of CME Group discuss the state of the European rates market.

This debate should be interesting because ICE and Eurex are currently battling for market share in the three-month Euribor futures space, Europe’s largest futures market by volume.

The panel is also timely because Eurex is introducing changes to its market-making incentive scheme to regulate its daily volume levels.

Matthias Graulich, Deutsche Boerse’s head of fixed income, funding and financing strategy and development, and a member of the executive board of Eurex Clearing, said last month: “We are making changes to the market-making scheme which will be effective from April 1 so if you look at the April and May figures, I think you will see a much more stable and consistent development over time, to get to a more consistent liquidity picture.”

Eurex’s recent three-month Euribor volumes underlined the need for the consistency that Graulich describes. On the last day of last month, March 28, Eurex traded 1.3 million lots of three-month Euribor, which was more than ICE’s 1.1 million contracts, meaning Eurex traded more Euribor than ICE in a single day for the first time in years, probably ever.

That is a key milestone but the issue around consistency becomes obvious if we look back to the previous week when Eurex traded on March 25 just 3,720 lots of Euribor, a slow day compared with ICE’s 930,000 lots.

The rates panel at FOW Amsterdam will also discuss the nascent market for futures linked to the European risk-free rate, the Euro Short-Term Rate (ESTR).

Here Eurex, ICE and CME are competing for market share and open interest. The latest development in that market was CME’s announcement on Tuesday that it will launch its ESTR options contract on May 20. This came after ICE said on March 22 it will launch its ESTR option on April 22.

Also last month, ICE overtook CME as the top exchange for ESTR open interest on March 14 and continued its momentum into the following week when the US group took on Tuesday a 50% market share in ESTR futures open interest (including spreads) for the first time.

Following the rates panel, attention moves to the European equity derivatives space which is also showing welcome signs of competition.

Among the panellists are Charlotte Alliot, the group head of Financial Derivatives at Euronext, Gustaf Adolf Renkwitz, the derivatives market supervisor at MEFF SIX Group, Iouri Saroukhanov, head of European derivatives at Cboe Europe, and Philipp Schultze, the head of Equity and Index Sales for EMEA at Eurex.

Recent developments in the European equity derivatives market include the March 25 roll-out of Cboe Europe Derivatives’ second wave of single stock options, which was slated for the first quarter of this year.

This latest block of 193 single stock options complements the first wave of 133 options launched by the Amsterdam-based exchange in November last year.

This panel will also discuss the implications of the rise and rise of US daily options for Europe.

Euronext was the first European group to launch daily options, on the Dutch blue chip index AEX in 2008, and this contract has thrived in recent years with trading volume up 18% last year to 4.4 million lots, according to the exchange.

The European exchange group followed this by launching in late February its first CAC 40 daily option contract.

Eurex introduced in August last year its first daily options product, based on the German exchange’s blue-chip benchmark the EuroSTOXX 50 index.

Cathal Hardiman, the head of direct counterparty trading Europe at IMC Trading who is speaking on an earlier panel at the FOW Amsterdam conference, told the FOW London conference in November liquidity in the Eurex daily options contract was growing.

Clotilde Salmeron, the head of MEFF, the derivatives market of Bolsas y Mercados Espanoles (BME), said last month increased retail participation in European derivatives is crucial to developing deeper liquidity in regional markets.