Speaking at the FOW Europe event in Amsterdam last week Matthew Judge, European head of sales at SGX Group, said growth has been driven by an increase in activity from existing users.

“What we have really noticed is that while there has not been a huge increase in new clients and participants coming to the market, our existing client base have definitely turned up their risk appetite and has come to the exchange to do that,” Judge said on a panel.

SGX last year added a micro version of its FTSE Taiwan index future, at one-tenth the size of the standard contract. Judge also pointed to updates to its flagship Straits Times Index (STI) contracts.

“Our responsibility is making sure that we have the products available to price that risk, so one of our strategies is to create more micro contracts which can help reduce that tail risk,” he added. “So price incrementals are much finer and intricate for our clients.

“We have recently launched the micro-Taiwan and we have made some changes to our STI [product suite] – and there are really encouraging signs [for adoption] so we are looking to do that with our equity-based products. For us its more product design and product development to reduce that marginal risk for our clients.”

Sundararaman Ramamurthy, managing director and chief executive of the Bombay Stock Exchange said that there has been a shift towards longer term options in the Indian market to manage disruption.

“Because of the underlying volatility increase, it is becoming costly,” Ramamurthy said. “That brings in the need for people to rethink whether they use zero-day-to-expiry or they should be trading longer term options more as a hedging strategy. In India I find that more of the thinking is trending more towards slightly longer-term options.”

He pointed to an overall increase in activity in the region.

“The market uncertainty has of course brought more participants into the market more seriously,” Ramamurthy said. “If I look at the March number of contracts traded [as against] the December position, I find there has been an increase of around 35% in the number of contracts traded. The premium at the same increased 17%.”

Cansu Kanli, head of Treasury Europe SE and EMEA, and NL Branch Manager and Board Member of NL Entities at UBS said that there had been a change in the way users see derivatives trading in response to a change in the risk landscape.

“The tail risk is getting thicker, and as a result we are seeing more use of derivatives as a business-as-usual (BAU) [instrument] rather than for ‘as if’ case scenarios, so that is what you see probably in the volumes as they pick up across the globe,” Kanli said on the panel.