Peel Hunt facilitates market liquidity in over 36,500 traded stocks, including the FTSE100 and overseas stocks. The firm attributes its success to its long-term commitment to clients and a 'joined-up' approach offering expertise in corporate, research, sales, sales trading, fixed income and market making, which distinguishes the firm from the competition.

In 2011 the team that develop and support Inferno, which today has clients and offices in London, Hong Kong and New York, became independent with the management buy-out of Torstone Technology.

Peel Hunt is an existing client, but before renewing their contract with Torstone, took the opportunity to review other securities processing software and services.

Steven Fine, Managing Partner at Peel Hunt, summarised the benefits of Inferno from his perspective: "Inferno enables us to trade a wide variety of assets classes, including corporate bonds, PIBs, ETFs as well as shares and the flexibility and quality of the Torstone team enables us to implement changes quickly. It also provides the information we need to budget and plan accurately and examine the impact and cost of new trading strategies quickly."

Peel Hunt achieves an STP rate of between 99 and 100 percent with Inferno from a team of eight people on the settlement desk, two on trade support and another one or two on compliance and static data set up. Stephen Hall, Head of Operations at Peel Hunt, outlined the key benefits of Inferno: "First is scalability — one day we peaked at 62,500 trades with Inferno quietly coping and no alarm bells ringing. That's impressive. Second is flexibility of the software which means requests for changes are made straightaway without waiting for a new version of the software. Whoever is on call will fix any problem and make the change which speaks volumes about the people as well as the software platform."

Torstone Technology releases software updates daily. Inferno also has a lot off modules within the same overall system so there is no need for different solutions for different asset classes. Stephen Hall continued: "With multiple systems you know that there is a lot of linking going on in the background which means there is a greater potential for things to go wrong. Reconciliation is the most obvious. As soon as a trade is booked into our front end system, it is immediately pulled into Inferno. We can deal with things that may go wrong immediately and unfixed trades never get lost, either. If asked I'd say Torstone's Inferno is by far and away the best system out there — and I've been looking for 20 years."

Brian Collings, CEO of Torstone Technology said: "Inferno is set to become a real alternative to the existing back office solutions available especially as it is proven for high volume equity trades as demonstrated by Peel Hunt. We look forward to continuing to work with them over the coming years."