Exegy launches FX market data and order-entry solution

data-478962811 — Going faster: "There is room for higher performance, more agile technology" - Karl Dundon, Exegy Exegy

Laura Matthews
16 Apr 2018

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Exegy, a provider of managed services and technology for low-latency market data, has launched Trade Port FX, a fully managed foreign exchange market data and order-entry solution that enables participants to meet their access requirements through a single vendor.

The solution comes as currency markets continue to grapple with liquidity fragmentation, new venues and numerous data feeds, as well as the varying speed, functionality requirements, and cost of building and maintaining trading infrastructure.

“The message we got loud and clear was that what clients are looking for is the ability to make one network connection to a vendor in a particular co-location data centre. In the key data centres where FX is traded, they wanted to make one network connection, and they wanted to have one interface where they received their market data and also enter their orders out to the marketplace,” says David Taylor, chief technology officer at Exegy.

“They also wanted the vendor to take care of all of the connectivity to the venue that they wanted to trade on. They wanted the ability to simply tell the vendor, ‘Now I’m ready to spin up this new venue, please enable that for me,’ and the vendor supplies on-demand access to new venues for both market data and order entry,” he adds.

Trade Port FX is accessed through a cross-connection at the co-location data centres in London and New York, with future points of presence to be enabled in data centres in Asia, depending on customer demand.

Through a single network connection, trading applications gain on-demand access to the main FX trading venues and liquidity providers, shielding firms from the cost and complexity of establishing and maintaining connectivity to an increasingly fragmented market.

Exegy says a combination of managed venue connectivity and bespoke computing appliances allows Trade Port FX to deliver normalised FX market data and order execution through a unified, FX-specific application-programming interface.

We have created an FX-specific API that is well-suited to the needs of next-generation e-FX trading applications
Karl Dundon, Exegy

Applications can help to customise their real-time data views, including composite pricing across venues. Additionally, there are easy-to-use sample applications and code-generation tools for a variety of applications to streamline workflow and expedite implementation schedules.

Over the last decade, Exegy has built up a reputation for providing high-performance, managed market data solutions for global equities, derivatives, commodities and fixed-income trading.

The firm began adding FX venues to its market data-feed handler portfolio in 2012, and has attracted several leading banks and buy-side fund managers. It aims to set itself apart from what is currently on the market through product performance, functionality, ease of use and quality of service.

Second generation e-FX

“We are in this second generation of the e-FX space, where we are starting to see the shelf-life of existing products on the market start to come to their peak and there is room for higher performance, more agile technology that can be managed more effectively [and] faster without having to have their own team dedicated to managing the switch,” says Karl Dundon, FX product manager at Exegy.

“We have created an FX-specific API that is well-suited to the needs of next-generation e-FX trading applications. In the aggregation and managed hosted services space, there really aren’t too many people out there who can do that effectively. Clients are looking for somebody who has the experience [of] doing that and who has a good FX product,” he adds.

Taylor says Exegy’s main competitors are the internal development teams at some firms that are still debating whether to build and maintain their own solutions or engage a vendor.

“We still run into that quite a bit. More and more people are deciding ‘let’s focus on our secret sauce and leave the rest to vendors’. We believe our 10 years of experience providing fully managed solutions gives us the credibility and capability to win their trust,” he says.