COLT has also extended the service to US organisations, signing up one of the world's largest investment banks as its first US customer.

On the back of demand for Proximity Hosting in Frankfurt, the company plans to extend these services to more of its 16 data centres to provide high speed access to all major European stock exchanges across 10 European countries.

Launched earlier this year, COLT's Proximity Hosting Services have seen significant interest from the financial services community as it seeks faster, more efficient trading techniques. It enable financial institutions to place their own order management systems as close as possible to Deutsche Börse's trading infrastructure, in COLT's Frankfurt data centre, so that data and order processing can be exchanged with minimal latency delay.

"Location has become the central front in the algorithmic trading war as traders battle to shave milliseconds off execution times," said Terry Quigley, Head of COLT's Financial Services team. "With algorithmic trading, even a millisecond's delay can significantly impact investor margins and profitability. Building on the success of our service in Europe, we are seeing growing demand for our data centre services as international banks in the US, on both the buy- and sell-side, seek to improve the speed of order execution and gain competitive advantage. This service effectively levels the playing field for European exchange trades, giving State-side players the ability to compete on an equal footing to their European-based competitors."

Jurre Ten Berge, IT Manager at All Options, one of COLT's new Proximity Hosting customers said, "getting the fastest possible access to the Deutsche Börse is key for our organisation. With its proximity hosting services, COLT offers just what we need."