Goldman Sachs’ Visual Structuring tool streamlines FX options pricing and analysis, helping traders visualise complex strategies and react quickly to market volatility

The FX options market remains complex, with traders still relying on spreadsheets and spreadsheet-inspired pricers to juggle multiple variables and model payoffs. While technology has transformed execution, the ideation and price discovery process has lagged behind, even as volatility and faster-moving markets have increased pressure to model and compare complex strategies more quickly. Goldman Sachs’ Visual Structuring tool, developed within its Marquee digital platform, reimagines that process, combining the firm’s quantitative infrastructure with a modern, intuitive interface that reflects how traders work today.

“The hardest part of the FX options process isn’t execution – it’s the pre-trade,” says Chris Churchman, head of Marquee at Goldman Sachs. “Once you know what you want to trade, execution is easy. But it’s hard figuring out with traditional tools where you think spot is going to go, what your risk and reward look like and the probability of different outcomes. Visual Structuring brings all of that analysis into one intuitive place.”

Accessible on Marquee, the tool provides a graphical environment in which users can model and price a wide range of options structures. Instead of entering parameters into grids of numbers, traders can use natural language or touch-based inputs to generate and compare variations. “We’ve effectively turned the chart itself into the interface,” Churchman says. “It’s like giving traders a map of their ideas – they can see risks, rewards and probabilities play out in real time.”

Behind the interface sits the same analytics stack that Goldman’s own trading desks use. Visual Structuring is powered by SecDB, the firm’s proprietary risk and pricing system, and GS Quant, an open-source Python toolkit providing real-time access to data, pricing models and back-testing. This allows the platform to run thousands of calculations across scenarios, assets and time horizons.

“When most people price an option, they price it at current spot on today’s date only,” Churchman explains. “We price it across every spot level between now and expiry, incorporating the live volatility surface, and back-test it over the past five years. That’s millions more data points – but we frame it in a way that is intuitive for a human trader.” 

While many firms have focused on automating execution, Goldman’s innovation targets the earlier, more human part of the process – how ideas are formed, tested and shared before a trade is made.

Equally important is how the tool transforms collaboration. In traditional workflows, traders often send each other implied volatility figures or screenshots of payoff graphs. Visual Structuring replaces that process with a shareable, interactive representation of the trade. “Instead of passing around a volatility number, you can send the entire structure,” Churchman says. “The recipient can open it, adjust strikes or maturities, back-test it, and immediately see how it behaves. It’s a cleaner, faster and more accurate way to communicate.”

The ability to visualise and iterate on complex structures extends even to exotic options. Churchman describes one example – a one-year EUR/USD call with a double knockout window – which traders can now construct and adjust in seconds. “It’s a structure that’s hard to build anywhere else,” he says. “But, with Visual Structuring, even something exotic becomes easy to understand. You can literally see where your trade makes money and where it doesn’t.”