Unlike its competitors, Caplin Xaqua is specifically designed for financial services applications - this real-time, online trading platform enables a bank to provide institutional end-users with a fully-branded, customised single-dealer portal that supports trading in a standard browser.

Nomura, the preeminent Asian-based investment bank, is already live with Caplin Xaqua, which it has deployed to launch its FX trading workstation - following the acquisition of Lehman Brothers' operations in Asia and its investment banking and equities businesses in EMEA. This new addition is the fourth major investment bank live with a Caplin single-dealer trading platform.

Paul Caplin, CEO of Caplin Systems, commented, "It's a year on from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and investment banks are once again investing in differentiating technology - to position themselves ahead of the competition, both now and for the future. Generic trading platforms simply don't offer this depth of functionality or level of customisation, which is why we are delighted to bring Caplin Xaqua to the market - a truly purpose-built solution for financial services. Having four major investment banks live on Caplin Xaqua is a tremendous endorsement to our technology and the development that we have invested in the platform."

Abid Zaidi, Nomura's Global Head of Fixed Income E-commerce IT, added, "Caplin Xaqua has enabled us to achieve high performance, low latency trading over the internet. We are now in a position to reach more clients and provide them with a direct and significantly more sophisticated trading experience. Additionally, the platform's design means that it can be easily extended to incorporate new asset classes or portals - this flexibility is much needed in today's rapidly changing trading environment."

Caplin Xaqua is the cross-product single-dealer platform that provides an 'anti-corruption layer' implemented using abstract financial objects. This layer normalises all trading, pricing and permissioning data and allows the browser client to be de-coupled from the bank's providing systems, while still being built on their models and workflows. Caplin Trader, Caplin's existing trading front-end, contained a great deal of the advanced functionality needed by the next generation of trading portals. This has now been added to the standard platform and is available to institutions developing portals in Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, .Net and Java. The result includes advanced concepts such as abstract financial objects and TradePipes.

Caplin Xaqua integrates with Nomura's FX trading workstation, which has been developed using Microsoft Silverlight, through Caplin's connecting technology, Caplin StreamLink.

Ian Warford, director, securities and capital markets, Microsoft EMEA, said, "Caplin Xaqua and Microsoft Silverlight complement each other extremely well in the front office, delivering a rich and engaging user experience, enabling trades to increase efficiency supported by an industrial-strength platform. We expect Nomura to gain further advantages from this combined implementation and we look forward to announcing more joint clients with Caplin in the future."