The Tora Crosspoint off-exchange liquidity venue is set to be rolled out in Hong Kong during the second quarter and Singapore and Australia later in the year.

The expansion will be funded using the proceeds of a minority investment in the company by Goldman Sachs earlier this year.

Crosspoint taps Tora's internal flow and the aggregation of liquidity from multiple venues in Asia, such as broker crossing engines and third-party pools.

In Japan, crossing venues including Credit Suisse's Crossfinder, Japannext and Kabu.com have recently linked to Crosspoint with several others expected to connect in the next few months.

The venue currently captures over four per cent of total trading volume of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and offered over $1.5 billion of daily liquidity in over 1800 individual equities during the first quarter, says Tora.

Robert Dykes, CEO, Tora, says: "Tora Crosspoint is unique in that it seeks liquidity in parallel with the user's everyday order flow. This is a breakthrough for traders in Asia who previously had to manually post their order flow, often resulting in low crossing rates and poor user experience."

According to Tabb Group, just 0.3% of value traded in Hong Kong, Korea, Australia, Singapore and Taiwan was traded off-exchange in 2008, with this set to rise to 1.5% in 2010.

However, with the region expected to follow Europe and the US in experiencing growing fragmentation, new players are entering the market. In March Investment Technology Group launched its Posit Marketplace while the Singapore Exchange and Chi-X have signed a heads of terms agreement to develop and launch Asia Pacific's first bourse-backed dark pool.