The firm says Elektron will let hedge funds, asset managers, banks, brokerages and exchanges connect to a worldwide financial community and securely reach trading partners.

The fibre-optic network taps strategically located proximity and co-location hosting centres, initially in New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Singapore. Later this year more centres are set to open in Hong Kong, India and Brazil.

Using the open and neutral network, clients, exchanges, brokers and other liquidity providers will be able to publish messages and content directly to their discrete counterparties and subscribe to service providers' analytics, algorithms, risk models, as well as post trade facilities and reference data resources.

This will help firms to trade faster, connect to more markets and interact freely across a global and secure cloud, says Thomson Reuters. In addition, the network's users will see operational costs fall and reduced time to market.

Thomson Reuters says benchmark testing indicates that Elektron delivers information up to 20 times faster than traditional aggregated data networks. The vendor claims that clients that have already moved their financial applications into the Elektron hosting centres have experienced significant cost reduction and superior performance.

Commenting on the network, Jon Robson, president, enterprise, Thomson Reuters says: "It marks a step-change in empowering customers, enabling them to innovate and connect to the markets and to each other across a neutral, global and content rich infrastructure. We are responding to the needs of a new era in the financial industry, one which requires that all participants benefit from increased transparency and equal access to markets."