OptionsCity has extended the hosting of its Metro electronic trading and market making platform and Freeway multi-asset trading engine to London, taking up residence in both the Interxion data centre in Brick Lane, East London and the NYSE data centre in Basildon, east of London.
The company’s arrival in London at the end of last year builds out its global hosting solution that is already established at Equinix data centres in New Jersey, Chicago and Frankfurt, as well as at the CME’s Aurora data centre in Chicago. The Interxion data centre in Brick Lane was selected for its proximity to London’s equity and derivatives markets, and provides direct market access, as well as low-latency connectivity and a large number of traders that could avail themselves of OptionsCity’s services. The Basildon data centre was selected for colocation with NYSE Liffe commodity markets.
Rudy Fasouliotis, chief information officer at OptionsCity, says the timing of the expansion to London reflected US customer interest in trading on London markets. This is underway and the company has also secured three European clients that are using its hosted solutions in London. The Metro electronic trading and market making platform is proving to be most popular for the time being, with users predominantly trading commodities and Euribor futures.
Fasouliotis says: “We offer a full service including software, hosting and connectivity. This reflects the change we see in how traders want to operate. They want one vendor for all their needs as setting up and maintaining hosting and connectivity can get expensive. This is a natural progression for trading software as it moves towards a software-as-a-service model and is tightly integrated with infrastructure. The hosting solution is essential to our growth and complements our software offering for customers that want to host our solutions themselves.”
OptionsCity says about 50% of its customers use its hosted solutions and that the percentage is growing, particularly among small proprietary shops and medium sized trading firms. Looking forward, it expects the Equinix LD4 data centre to the west of London to be its next hosting location, but that will depend on customer demand, and it is discussing expansion into Asia as the next logical step in the development of the global hosting solution. It cites Orc as its keenest competitor, but suggests newer technology differentiates its solutions, making them simple, fast and efficient to set up and use.
Subscribe to our newsletter
