About a-team Marketing Services
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: Post-Trade Transformation: Automating Clearing & Settlement

Date: 1 December 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes The UK, EU and Swiss markets move to T+1 settlement on 11 October 2027, but the first binding compression arrives almost a year earlier. ESMA’s amended settlement discipline RTS expects allocation and confirmation completed by 23:00 CET on trade...

BLOG

FINOS Puts Common Domain Model (CDM) 7 into Production

In July, the FinTech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) released CDM 7 on GitHub consolidating more than 130 individual upgrades and development releases and followed up with a detailed analysis on August 14. The analysis was authored by Lionel Smith-Gordon and Ben Page of REGnosys, an active corporate member and key technology contributor to FINOS. The...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 10th year, RegTech Summit London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to innovate the compliance function and response.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2026

AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...