Aquis Technologies, the financial and regulatory technologies arm of Aquis Exchange PLC, announces that its new connectivity hub, Aquis Market Gateway (AMG), has significantly increased the number of active users in the last quarter and is now Europe’s leading SI connectivity network.
The AMG, which went live in early 2019, is designed to enable Systematic Internalisers (SIs) and Counterparties to connect bilaterally, via a normalised application programming interface (API). The relationship between SIs and their Counterparties (brokers) via the AMG is entirely and strictly bilateral and thus in line with MiFID II stipulations.
Users of the AMG include SIs operated by XTX Markets Limited, Jane Street Financial Limited Citadel Securities (Europe) Limited, Tower Research Capital Europe Limited and Hudson River Trading Europe Limited. The list of counterparties on AMG includes Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Kepler Cheuvreux.
Aquis Technologies creates and licenses high volume, low latency trading platforms, complex connectivity solutions and real-time trade monitoring and surveillance technology for banks, brokers, investment firms and exchanges.
As each SI has its own unique interface, Counterparties wishing to connect with SIs need to undertake specific bespoke infrastructure projects for each SI that they wish to connect to. The AMG simplifies this process by normalising access via the API. At no point is there a common matching hub within the AMG. It uses bespoke technology from Aquis and is designed with flexibility to the fore.
Commenting, Slawomir Rzeszotko from Jane Street said: “As an SI operator, we appreciate AMG providing another avenue for counterparties to connect and access our liquidity – this will help facilitate and optimise their experience with SI electronic liquidity providers.”
Jigar Patel from XTX Markets added: The opportunity to onboard an established community of counterparts and SI partners via AMG’s high-performance environment allows XTX to scale-up our SI relationships by offering our bespoke, low-market impact liquidity.’
Magnus Almqvist, Head of Technology Sales at Aquis, said: “We’ve had a great start with the AMG and we expect many more participants to join. Users appreciated that connecting to the AMG streamlines their whole process, lowers their time and costs to market and, crucially, that it is done in a visibly bilateralway.”