About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Colt Partners NPL to Deliver Time Service Suited to MiFID II

Subscribe to our newsletter

Colt Technology Services is offering financial firms using its colocation services a timestamping capability that more than meets the requirements of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II).

The company has partnered with the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to deliver precise timing capabilities to firms using its colocation services in Equinix data centres in Slough and Interxion facilities in London. This enables firms to timestamp all reportable trades to within one microsecond of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), significantly improving on the smallest 100 microsecond level stipulated by the RTS 25 timing regulation under MiFID II.

The Precision Time Protocol (PTP), based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) signal sourced directly from NPL, is being integrated by Colt at the network level, offering a consistent time across multiple trading applications. The company says the service introduced at Equinix and Interxion will be will be rolled out to other UK colocation sites according to customer demand.

Andrew Housden, vice president of capital markets at Colt, comments: “NPL has one of the world’s most accurate time signals, providing our financial markets customers with a highly reliable solution.” NPL’s CsF2 atomic clock is accurate to one second every 158 million years.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Navigating the Build vs Buy Dilemma: Cloud Strategies for Accelerating Quantitative Research

Date: 20 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes For many quantitative trading firms and asset managers, building a self-provisioned historical market data environment remains one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive steps in establishing a new research capability. Sourcing data, normalising symbologies, handling corporate actions and maintaining...

BLOG

Swap Data Was Supposed to Deliver Transparency. A Decade Later, Regulators Are Still Trying to Use It

For more than a decade, regulators have collected vast quantities of derivatives transaction data through swap data repositories (SDRs) mandated by post-crisis financial reforms. Yet despite the scale of these datasets, transforming reported trade data into meaningful supervisory insight has often proved more difficult than policymakers anticipated. A new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 15th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Corporate Actions Europe 2010

The European corporate actions market could be the stage of some pretty heavy duty discussions regarding standards going forward, particularly with regards to the adoption of both XBRL tagging and ISO 20022 messaging. The region’s issuer community, for one, is not going to be easy to convince of the benefits of XBRL tags, given the...