Activ Financial Systems joins SFTI partnership

This agreement will enable ACTIV to receive NYSE, NASDAQ, ARCA and market data feeds via SFTI. In addition, as part of an agreement they signed with Sector, Inc., a leading managed services, communications, and market data provider for the financial services industry, ACTIV has implemented receipt and dissemination of their ActivFeed consolidated multicast output to customer sites through SFTI B2BSM, which facilitates receipt and distribution of critical market data.

SFTI is nationally recognized for its resiliency and redundancy. Based on proven state-of-the-art technology, SFTI provides clients with a communications platform of unparalleled diversity and reliability that will carry their order flow and other critical data communications through a closed, high bandwidth, optical and highly available network. SFTI B2BSM from Sector enables firms to employ SFTI connectivity to communicate with exchanges, market centers and content service providers not hosted by SIAC.

According to Bob Brzezinski, ACTIV’s Director of Network Operations, "In our business, speed and resiliency are paramount. The faster we receive and deliver data, the more we can satisfy the critical needs of our customers. We performed rigorous analysis on how to best source native exchange feeds from speed, reliability, and cost perspectives, and were most impressed by the SFTI B2B infrastructure. SFTI's overall delivery performance was especially important when looking at the latency values of NASDAQ data into our Chicago facility," remarks Mr. Brzezinski. As Vendor of Record for all North American equity, futures, and options exchanges, ACTIV operates two fully redundant ticker plants in New York, and Chicago, with POPs in San Francisco, Toronto, and several hosted facilities within customer facilities. As part of the implementation, ACTIV upgraded to two redundant Gig connections at each of its North American ticker plants into SFTI.

"The events of September 11, 2001, showed that the financial industry needed a more secure and reliable way to transmit data communications," said Steve Romano, Senior Vice President and SFTI General Manager at SIAC. "We firmly believe that the value proposition SFTI offers has made it the platform of choice to support order flow and market data traffic for all Exchanges, market centers, electronic communications networks, alternative trading systems and content service providers."

"We are very pleased to add ACTIV to our growing list of clients who have a need for speed and choose to gain the extra advantage that comes with faster, more direct access to receive and disseminate market data, said Lou Modano, Senior Vice President of Sector. "We appreciate the confidence that ACTIV has placed in our ultra low latency solutions."

Acting as a content service provider, ACTIV is offering the SFTI B2BSM infrastructure for their customers, including market makers and specialist firms, who receive either multicast and or hosted TCP delivery of ActivFeed and ActivFeed Direct products. With its new SFTI infrastructure, ACTIV has added a range of full depth feeds including: NYSE OpenBook, NASDAQ TotalView, and ARCA in addition to its CTA and OPRA feeds. All North American equities, futures and options exchanges are made available through consistently highly performance.

"As a high-end low latency market data provider, we place enormous trust in our key partners to be as dedicated as we are in lowering the overall costs of acquiring direct exchange data. It certainly helps that SFTI is already connected to a community of Tier 1 customers," said Mike Dunne, CTO at ACTIV. "There are very few vendors through who, one can receive both latency and operational cost benefits when deploying direct exchange feed solutions. The SFTI value proposition allows us to connect to many sources, and to deliver our products to a targeted community."

SFTI has garnered industry-wide acceptance and has been cited by numerous government agencies and industry organizations including, The U.S. Treasury Department, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Securities Industry Association, and the Bond Market Association, as a model of resilient communications.