Icap still best broker for forex

David Rutter, deputy chief executive at Icap electronic broking in London, pointed to a combination of quicker trade times and greater depth of the order book as two big improvements since last year's victory.

"We now show a greater depth of book with the first three price points, whereas traditionally on EBS we only showed the top-of-book price," said Rutter.

Meanwhile, the reduction in trade times was achieved by deploying more than 100 Linux distribution servers across the system in the fourth quarter, 2007. Average global trade times are now 60-65 milliseconds, with regional times in New York at five milliseconds and in London at six to seven milliseconds. When Icap acquired EBS in June 2006, global deal times were 285 milliseconds.

The interdealer broker also added 15 new clients to its Global Access web-based trading application in a bid to extend its reach into emerging markets.

Icap spends more than $100 million a year on its electronic platform. Philip Gilligan, the firm's New Jersey-based chief information officer, said early 2009 will see a large software release that will allow greater configurability of the system by the end user in terms of how the book depth and prices are displayed.

"The core infrastructure matching engines will also be replaced around December/January," Gilligan added. "A new hardware platform from Hewlett Packard should give us two to three times' improvement in terms of capacity."

Icap's capacity is already twice as much as recorded peaks to provide a cushion for the system. The broker reported that average daily electronic volumes in October were up 22% from last year at $243.8 billion. The record daily volume was $456 billion on August 16 last year.