Gissing says its MiFID pre-trade output handler and post-trade output handler are being developed following the publication of the Level 2 Guidance in February which stipulates that all securities industry participants across the EU follow the same regulations with regard to market transparency.

MiFID will enable banks to offer financial products across all 25 EU member states, but the directive will require all banks in the EU to publish post-trade data to one or more venues within three minutes of the transaction. Furthermore, systematic internalisers – organisations that complete transactions internally rather than on the market – will be required to publish pre-trade quotes in real-time.

Richard Gissing, CTO of Gissing Software, says to ensure MiFID compliance by the current deadline of November 2007, and allow sufficient time for testing, firms will need to have implemented the appropriate data handling systems by early 2007.

The new MiFID handlers will enable users of Gissing's ConTeX system to automatically contribute both pre-trade and post-trade MiFID data to aggregation venues. As soon as the data is published onto their own market data platform it will be automatically routed to the appropriate destinations in real-time. The data is routed using the FAST (Fix Adapted for STreaming) data communications protocol and two lines to each destination are supported to ensure no break in connectivity.

The vendor says the output handlers will also automatically record an audit trail of each trade report, as well as the timeliness of each message published, allowing firms to demonstrate that all prices were published inside the three minute time limit.

Links to industry-standard databases and archival and retrieval systems will enable firms to store the data for the required time period, which is 12 months for pre-trade data and five years for post-trade data.