The MarketXS TradeNet solution is a fully outsourced and independent alternative to traditional providers of order routing services, based on IP technology and the FIX standard. MarketXS TradeNet will become available as an additional logical feature to the existing market data display services of MarketXS, enabling the end-user to take direct action on market situations and facilitating the straight through processing of orders. MarketXS is currently incorporating the smartTrade engine into its Finance Engine architecture, with a view to offering integrated order routing capabilities within its MarketXSPro terminal and through newly designed order entry interfaces.

Smart Trade is best known for its trading middleware that allows banks to build and operate rapidly multi-asset class private trading platforms. It also provides technology for single-dealer, multibank and exchange communities, and market data vendors migrating towards transaction services.

MarketXS selected Smart Trade for its design, which is multi-asset class capable, offers interoperability and scalability and results in a fast time-to-market. Floris Alkemade, Chief Executive Officer of MarketXS, comments: "We chose Smart Trade because of the quality of the technology, enabling us to offer solutions in multiple markets to multiple types of clients. Integrating Smart Trade is proving to be very rapid and allows us to deliver our proprietary trading system TradeNet as a full-featured service."

MarketXS TradeNet provides a flexible order routing network for brokers aiming to reduce both the dependency on the existing 'owners' of trading desktops and the high IT costs resulting from building and maintaining proprietary trading applications and dedicated client connections. It will give brokers the possibility to deliver a 'private branded' order routing object (terminal) to their buy-side customers, within the trusted and unbiased market data environment of MarketXS and yet stay in full control of trading entitlement for each individual client, leading to a unique customer service experience.

"We are glad that MarketXS chose us to participate in the TradeNet project along with their engineering teams by bringing our framework and our know-how to accelerate the time-to-market of this promising order routing solution," says Harry Gozlan, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Smart Trade. Smart Trade skills originally come from a combined expertise in trading the markets and in building the systems and analytics that support those activities. Over the recent years, with a unique and constant focus on how distribution and transaction processes can be optimized within and between financial institutions, the system's design has progressed significantly along this same learning curve.

MarketXS TradeNet is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2004.