NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions, a unit of NYSE Euronext (NYX), today announced the launch of its ground-breaking SFTI Community Platform. Enabling technology providers to offer products to trading firms via a hosted environment powered by NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions’ Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI)®. The SFTI Community Platform is the industry’s first network offering customers global connectivity coupled with innovative third-party technology solutions. With hundreds of firms already accessing global financial markets though the SFTI network, the SFTI Community Platform allows participating firms to quickly and easily “plug in” to access the value-added products and services offered by a broad range of technology providers.
“The introduction of the SFTI Community Platform marks a major innovation in the development, distribution and accessibility of financial services technology,” said Sam Johnson, Executive Vice President, NYSE Euronext. “In developing this system, we wanted to join the largest collection of broker dealers and liquidity providers with the most inventive, value added software developers like UNX and Progress Software to create a customer experience unlike anything in today’s financial marketplace. The SFTI Community Platform is a first-of-a-kind system that will allow our customers to be part of the most innovative technology environment complemented by superior connectivity to the largest, most accessible global liquidity pool in the world.”
UNX, a leading provider of technology and agency brokerage services to the buy-side and sell-side, has announced that it will become a participant in the new SFTI Community Platform. Responding to interest from New York Stock Exchange trading-floor brokers, UNX will integrate its MetaBook product with the Broker Booth Support System (BBSS) hand-held devices, enabling them to route orders from their hand-helds to other markets for the first time. This will greatly expand floor brokers’ ability to locate and access liquidity on behalf of customers.
“With the UNX Advanced Market Access execution fabric, NYSE floor brokers have the best tools available to access the markets,” said Terry Dolan, principal of The Dolan Group. Adding to this, Michael Rosen of UNX said, “By more effectively integrating their substantial liquidity with the rest of the markets, all members of the investment community are better served.”
Additionally, Progress Software’s Apama platform, the industry's leading CEP environment, is planned to be made available on the SFTI Community Platform. Supporting applications that monitor rapidly moving event streams, detect patterns and take action - with sub-millisecond latency, the Apama CEP technology is the market-leading platform for algorithmic trading, enabling both sell-side and buy-side traders to leverage proprietary trading strategies, rather than rely on packaged "black box" algorithms. The Apama "white box" platform puts control in the hands of traders, who can create, test, deploy, and manage their own algorithmic trading strategies.
Dr. John Bates, founder and general manager of the Apama division of Progress Software said: “The selection of the Apama platform by NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions further affirms Apama’s market leadership in delivering mission critical CEP-powered securities applications. The richness of the Apama CEP platform will provide traders with the algorithmic trading tools needed to continuously seek out the right liquidity and develop and execute trading strategies more rapidly than their competitors.”
The announcement of plans to make UNX’s MetaBook and Progress Software’s Apama products available over the SFTI network demonstrates NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions’ commitment to facilitating the creation and distribution of value-added trading solutions to customers through the first-of-a-kind, SFTI Community Platform.