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

Recorded Webinar: Data platform modernisation: Best practice approaches for unifying data, real time data and automated processing

Financial institutions are evolving their data platform modernisation programmes, moving beyond data-for-cloud capabilities and increasingly towards artificial intelligence-readiness. This has shifted the data management focus in the direction of data unification, real-time delivery and automated governance. The drivers of this transition are improved operational efficiency as manual processes are replaced by faster, more accurate automated...

BLOG

MiFIR Schema 1.4.0 Rollout: Testing Clarity Still Pending – April Deadline Remains

As of mid-February 2026, the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) MiFIR reporting webpage continues to indicate that a dedicated test environment for updated transparency messages would open in February, with exact dates to be confirmed in January. No detailed testing calendar has been published at the time of writing. The result is a compressed...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit New York

Our TradingTech Summit in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

ESG Handbook 2021

A-Team Group’s ESG Handbook 2021 is a ‘must read’ for all capital markets participants, data vendors and solutions providers involved in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing and product development. It includes extensive coverage of all elements of ESG, from an initial definition and why ESG is important, to existing and emerging regulations, data challenges...