“ICAP is the most highly regarded inter-dealer broker of fixed income securities in the world, and we are pleased to have participated in the success of their BrokerTec platform,” said Klas Ståhl, President, OMX Technology. “This extended agreement reinforces our strong business relationship with ICAP, and represents a real vote of confidence in our ability to continue to meet their technology needs as they grow and expand their business.”
“We appreciate OMX’s extensive technical expertise and solid understanding of the electronic trading arena and the global securities markets,” said Jay Spencer, Global Chief Information Officer, ICAP. “As our planned growth places increased demands on our electronic trading platforms, we are confident that we can continue to rely on OMX to support us in the expansion of our business.”
In addition to the extended contractual agreement, OMX has delivered upgrades to the BrokerTec trading system that improves bandwidth efficiency for BrokerTec’s market data broadcasting component by fifty percent, as well as enrich response time for the broadcasts. The upgrades were achieved without increases in existing bandwidth. As a result of these developments, changes to BrokerTec’s order depth and price levels resulting from any order entry or change will update all customer gateways in an average of less than a tenth of a second from initial input. These improvements make the overall market data broadcasting component, which was always efficient, even more so.
Mr. Spencer noted, “The landscape in U.S. Treasury trading continues to evolve from the original implementation of the BrokerTec system. Increasing levels of broadcasts of market data information during economic releases continue to produce substantial throughput demands. We’re constantly reviewing, evaluating and refining methods to make an already fast system faster. These system upgrades clearly improve this component for each client and enhance network efficiency and response times for all of BrokerTec’s users.”
In operation since June 2000, BrokerTec has transacted more than $200 trillion in fixed income securities. Since its inception, OMX has supplied ICAP’s BrokerTec with its electronic inter-dealer platform. In addition to ICAP’s BrokerTec platform, ICAP operates a number of electronic broking platforms including i-Swap, FRA-Cross, DataTec, BankOxygen and the recently launched i-Forwards.
