With its sponsored access service, BATS Europe provides sponsoring participants, such as Nomura, with sophisticated risk management features, including the ability to set various constraints on orders for pre-trade protection and to receive real-time information of their clients' order and trade activity on the BATS Europe Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF).

"We are delighted that Nomura has connected to BATS Europe as our first sponsored access broker and we look forward to earning order flow from their clients," said Paul O'Donnell, COO of BATS Europe. "Sponsored access is in high demand and we will continue to aggressively connect key market players to BATS Europe's growing pool of liquidity. As BATS Europe's one-year anniversary approaches, we remain committed to Making Markets Better with our world-class, low latency platform that meets the needs of a diverse participant base."

"We are proud to be the first broker to offer sponsored access to our clients via BATS Europe," said Jeff Zorek, Global Co-Head of Prime Product Management at Nomura. "This initiative is part of Nomura's strategy of providing our clients with ultra low latency access to all major pools of liquidity in a technically intelligent manner. Our long-term ambition as a trading house and an investment bank is to be the number one global liquidity provider by 2011 and we see this as an important milestone towards that goal."

BATS Europe currently executes approximately 8% of trading in the FTSE 100 and 4% of pan-European trading in all major indices.

Sponsored access connectivity is available via proximity hosting with BATS Europe's systems or via remote access.