The new release offers clients even more improved performance and greater possibilities to build new trading infrastructure.

The evolution is materialized by a new generation of matching algorithms that enable orders to be matched on multiple parameters (price, volatility, yield) under user-defined matching criteria (not always based on the price ranking), and consequently offers more ways to define trading strategies as well as additional order types.

Increased marshalling speed and compression rates enable the platform to reach extremely fast processing and matching rates. This is accomplished whether matched internally within STTP, routed to external sources of liquidity, or split against the aggregated market depth.

Pluggable Transport protocols can now be defined via dedicated plug-ins, sharply reducing the implementation time within the bank by leveraging on the existing infrastructure and middleware.

Additionally, new Studio GUI's have been released on the order-entry and client-facing side. One for retail clients and another one dedicated to FX (Options, one-click trading). These are built on top of the Transaction Development Kit, the main object-oriented API of STTP. Additionally, Studio has been transformed into a container of components that can be developed either by the bank's IT teams, or by Smart Trade. Consequently, custom branding can be rendered real and easy, without necessarily redeveloping an entirely new front-end for each category of users, and for each bank.

The main benefits for banks to use STTP 4.0 are performance, flexibility, deployment, time-to-market, integration costs and personalisation. This means, for each project to be built or re-vamped, a much lower Total Cost of Ownership for the bank.

Smart Trade's clients will be migrated to STTP 4.0 in the beginning of 2006.