The new ASPone neXis product suite provides financial firms with ways to manage the many changes impacting infrastructure for low-latency electronic trading by offering a suite of managed services from network management through to application integration.

ASPone neXis builds on the company’s established capabilities in communications networks by combining a coordinated range of services for low-latency electronic trading to include colocation management, network cross-connections, monitoring and integration capability. The objective is to broaden the reach of high speed network access to global business centres, making low latency communications accessible to the whole market.

ASPone Ltd launched the new high speed infrastructure on Wednesday at a conference on Global Trends in FX eTrading held jointly with ACI Russia – the Financial Markets Association.

The event in Moscow saw presentations by the ACI, Progress Apama and ASPone to a large audience of key Russian banks interested in discussing how electronic networks are developing to improve access to FX liquidity.

Moscow is an important market and one where ASPone is already well established. Local manager Maria Fedorova says the new service fits well with the challenges facing Russian banks. “There are a lot of changes in how banking is developing, caused by forthcoming regulations, increased competition and advancing technology. ASPone neXis provides a resilient and flexible platform for banks’ network and communication layers; it will enable banks to move with the market and respond to these changes as they happen” she says.

Patrick McGrath, CEO adds “With ASPone neXis, we are demonstrating ASPone as a leading light in offering the unique combination of systems integration services with low-latency network infrastructure. Whilst we have announced ASPone neXis in Moscow, we are rolling the service out across all time zones”.

The new system is the ASPone Hybrid Execution Platform (HEP) and a key design goal is to bring an integrated approach to sales or broker-desk efficiency from pre-trade liquidity discovery through to accurate post-trade processing. HEP achieves this by some smart architectural features that bring a coherent view across traders firm orders and indicative quotes being managed by the broker.

Key features include:

• System designed to integrate voice and electronic broking workflows across a desk
• Multiple trading methods including order book, RFQ, quote matching
• Modular architecture to enable interaction with 3rd party execution venues (SEF / OTF) for price discovery and regulatory compliant execution
• Tools to enable brokers to support their clients trading strategies and ensure efficient trade capture for accurate post-trade processing
• Workflows incorporate new regulations regarding market transparency (e.g. Dodd Frank Act concepts such as multiple RFQ and 15 second rule)
• Interfaces tailorable to link to multiple execution venues and MarkitServ for connection to central counterparties (CCP)
• ASPone HEP can be utilised:
• By Inter Dealer Brokers or sell-side Broker/Dealers
• For potentially any asset class – FX Options, OTC swaps and other derivatives from day one
• Across multiple regulatory jurisdictions
• In any geographic region
• Across multiple desk locations
• In a hosted or locally deployed implementation
• ASPone HEP can either:
• provide a brokerage firm with a complete SEF/OTF solution;
• or act as a front-end to make in-house desk workflows efficient whilst connecting to a 3rd party SEF/OTF for compliant trading.
• Additional services available including strategy management and auction trading

The ACI Singapore Charity Golf Tournament is a long standing annual match that raises funds for local charities supporting the less fortunate. The 2011 event raised S$1.23 million (over USD1 million) and the beneficiaries were five charities covering the needs of the elderly, poor families and children, as well as a hospital. Pictures from the 2011 event can be found at this link.

Nittan Capital can now provide electronic FX Options price matching services to complement their established voice broking business. Banks across Asia can choose to trade Nittan Capital prices directly on their screen or by phone to Nittan Capital’s FX Options broking desk.

The new service is underpinned by the ASPone Hybrid Execution Platform (HEP) system which provides bank dealers with screen-based capabilities to view and post FX option orders onto the Nittan Capital price matching system and then to execute trades on-line. The system complements Nittan Capital’s voice-broking services.

Denis Cheung, Managing Director of Nittan Capital, explained “Nittan Capital are determined to maintain our position as a leading broker in Asia and see the extension of electronic price matching services to our clients as an important way to enhance their access to our liquidity. Building on our existing relationship with ASPone we plan to leverage hybrid voice and screen trading technology to ensure our clients have trade execution choice and accurate post-trade processing”.

The new service means client banks across Asia can enter, hit and take at-the-money FX option orders for a large number of currency pairs and also enter orders for more complex FX options which are made available by the Nittan Capital FX option brokers who then match them for execution. The brokers also monitor trading activity and place orders on behalf of clients. Risk reversals will soon be added to the service.

The system is an implementation of ASPone’s Hybrid Execution Platform which delivers a complete workflow for trading OTC instruments and integrates with other systems for post-trade processing, portfolio management, etc. Trade confirmation is achieved through integration with post-trade services like TRTN (Thomson Reuters Trade Notification) and MarkitSERV to complete the workflow for all trades executed on the system.

Patrick McGrath, Chief Executive of ASPone Ltd, said “Our solution is a very good match for Nittan Capital. Its modular architecture and flexibility mean that Nittan Capital can easily extend it onto other broking desks by adding further asset classes and providing related functionality to create a single solution which can ultimately be used by the Nittan Capital brokers in all their offices and by all their clients”.

Nittan Capital is one of the leading brokers in the Asian inter-dealer market. Its inter-dealer brokerage business involves providing brokerage services exclusively for commercial and investment banks to trade a wide array of over-the-counter financial and derivative products involving foreign exchange, money markets, interest rates and equity derivative products. Uniquely focused on key Asian markets, Nittan Capital currently serves over 130 institutional clients, including all leading investment and commercial banks. Its parent company, Central Tanshi, is the largest inter-dealer broker in Japan.

ASPone Limited is a privately-owned company which specialises in the provision of end-to-end financial IT solutions and services to cover the full trade lifecycle from front-office price discovery to back-office STP confirmation and beyond. ASPone is committed to providing financial institutions with innovative, efficient solutions for their real-time market data and transactional management requirements, hosting services and software application development.

• Alexander Nazarov joins the Moscow office to manage QA activities, adding his banking technology experience gained previously at Deutsche Bank.
• The ASPone Singapore team is also boosted with the arrival of Jennifer Tan as Finance Manager, Asia-Pacific.
• Nufraz Nagoor joins the product management team in London having recently relocated from Dubai where he developed technology with Mubasher Financial Services and Nadastra.
• Mezbaur Rahman is now part of the ASPone systems support team. He was formerly of Lombard, a subsidiary of RBC.
• Bill Pinfold is in the Business Development Manager role having joined in July from Thomson Reuters, with immediate projects addressing the impact of regulatory change on ASPone trading systems.
• Meanwhile Moscow based business manager Maria Fedorova extends her remit to cover sales across Europe for financial systems and networks.

“We are really pleased to have recruited such excellently talented new colleagues to support our business growth in serving clients” said CEO Patrick McGrath. “This aids our on-going expansion of our networks and will see the release of new products in the derivatives trading space in due course, to service clients working to comply with Dodd-Frank and MiFID II / EMIR regulations”.

ASPone is well placed to assist organisations to meet the requirements and associated deadlines and is already actively engaged with its clients, current and prospective, discussing requirements and potential solutions.

ASPone has a track record as a technology partner and end-to-end trading services provider that positions us to deliver SEF solutions to meet the regulations. The basis for this is the ASPone Transaction Routing Hub, a flexible and configurable middleware platform, which can handle any financial data (from real-time streaming through to historical and reference data) across all asset classes. It supports most industry-standard protocols such as FIX, FAST and Thomson Reuters’ Marketlink. On top of TRH, ASPone provides a number of workflow solutions across the trading spectrum – from pre-trade price discovery, across order matching, DMA and exchange trading through to transaction reporting, order management and portfolio management.

Additionally, ASPone is contributing to SEF related content for the British Bankers Association’s fourth Annual International Banking Conference in June 2011.