Icap, the world's premier interdealer broker, has announced significant enhancements to its award-winning EBS Live data feed.
EBS Live is the FX industry's leading real-time spot FX market data feed and is designed for banks and professional FX trading organisations. It delivers the transactional data required for accurate and timely pricing and decision-making, direct from ICAP's foreign exchange trading platform EBS to a customer's market data distribution system.
First among the enhancements are improvements to processing latency, the speed at which data is generated in the system. Processing latency has become increasingly important as customer pricing engines, black box trading models and risk management tools become more sophisticated.
ICAP has also significantly improved EBS Live communications latency, or the speed at which data moves within the network architecture, through an upgrade of the EBS distributed global architecture. Taken together, these two enhancements have reduced total latency in data distribution by approximately 95%.
ICAP will also shortly pilot a state-of-the-art streaming protocol, Fast FIX. Fast FIX compresses market data messages, further reducing transmission latency, or the time it takes for data to reach customers' systems, thereby enabling more data to be sent over the same amount of bandwidth. ICAP anticipates that the Fast FIX protocol will reduce transmission latency by as much as 10%.
John Nixon, CEO of ICAP Electronic Broking, said: "The growing number of bank and non-bank professional FX traders using EBS Live need the fastest possible access to our transactional market data. With these enhancements we have reduced latency at each critical stage to better satisfy our customers' need for efficient and effective data delivery."