Icap, the world's leading interdealer broker, announced that its electronic fixed income business BrokerTec has successfully launched with its customers a new trading system for its U.S. based products using a modified version of the Nasdaq OMX Genium INET system.
The new system provides very low latency and high throughput, as well as built in capabilities for manual traders.
The upgraded BrokerTec trading platform retains all the functionality previously available on the system, and is built using technology which enables BrokerTec to increase order volume tenfold and decrease order input latency by as much as 50 times in some cases. The platform's average latency is now less than 200 microseconds, with previous average latency approximately 10 milliseconds.
BrokerTec will complete its global upgrade by the end of April.
Dan Cleaves, Head of BrokerTec U.S., said: "We're very pleased to have successfully launched the new BrokerTec platform in the U.S. All BrokerTec customers, including both manual and API traders, will now benefit from substantially increased performance and greatly enhanced user experience. I'd like to sincerely thank all our customers, partners, ICAP staff, and our BrokerTec team led by BrokerTec CIO Arthur D'Arcy, for their hard work and patience in making this project a success."
Ravit Mandell, Head of J.P. Morgan Quantitative Market Making, said: "It has been a pleasure working with BrokerTec on the launch of the new Genium INET system - they kept us well informed, met their dates, and the new low latency platform has a balance between the needs of the manual trader and those utilizing automated trading tools."
Steve Yu, Director of Rates and E Trading Technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said: "The markets we trade in require the most sophisticated platforms available. We're very happy with BrokerTec's new system, and the switchover happened on time and without a hitch. Given the emphasis on speed and reliability, we feel confident the BrokerTec system will continue to meet our short and long term trading needs."
Ann Neidenbach, Senior Vice President of Global Software Development at NASDAQ OMX, said: "ICAP's BrokerTec is a premier global platform in the fixed-income markets, and we are pleased that they recognize the multi-asset capability of Genium INET as well as benefits in latency, scalability and performance improvements."