Customers who use SFTI to access BATS will have access to order entry using a subset of the FIX 4.2 protocol as well a real-time information about executions and real-time full depth of book quotations and execution information. "We are glad to announce the SFTI link and look forward to providing SFTI users with access to BATS' ever-growing pools of liquidity," said Ken Conklin, BATS' senior vice president in charge of sales and marketing. BATS handles about 9% of trading volume in U.S. cash equities.

"We are always looking to add market centers and exchanges that will benefit SFTI customers," said Sam Johnson, NYSE Euronext EVP and CEO of NYSE TransactTools. "As one of the fastest growing top tier equity market centers, BATS is a welcome addition."

SFTI is the NYSE TransactTools highly resilient, ultra low latency communications backbone created in 2002 for the financial industry. It offers connectivity to multiple exchanges, market centers and content services providers including all of the National Market System markets in the U.S and also connects to over 800 market participants. SFTI FIX provides open, standards-based access for data and trading. The OMS neutral FIX router enables customers to get to any destination through a single FIX connection.

SFTI was designed to be the industry's most secure and resilient network for electronic trading and was engineered to contain no single point of failure. All connections, equipment, power supplies and network links are redundant. Independent, self-healing fiber-optic rings enable financial data traffic to move uninterrupted along another pathway should a SFTI fiber pathway be compromised.