Leveraging a proprietary matching engine, buy-side and sell-side clients will now have access to retail and institutional order flow before it goes to the open market.

The new alternative trading system is the first dark pool to leverage an even allocation matching algorithm to fill orders on a per-participant basis, thus abandoning the price-time priority and pro-rata conventions. Citi Cross offers an alternative to the latency arms-race by removing the notion of queue position.

"Citi Cross allows our clients with varying trading styles to provide a valuable source of liquidity to institutional and retail flows," said Hannes Greim, Head of Citi Cross ATS. "By mitigating those factors which have generated market micro-structure advantages on other platforms, we have created a venue on which historically eschewed flows can interact in a controlled, equitable, and even manner."

"Innovation is core to our development and what clients have increasingly come to expect from Citi as we continually expand our product breadth and service offerings," said Dan Keegan, Global Head of Cash Equities. "Citi Cross levels the playing field, affording a low latency platform with commonality in how price improvement is shared across all market participants."

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.