Buy-Side Technology Awards 2015: Best Buy-Side Low-Latency Trading Network—Interactive Data

“We allow our clients to focus on optimizing their trading strategies while we take care of their technology requirements to accelerate their time to market and manage their total cost of ownership,” says Sean Brown, president of Interactive Data’s 7ticks.

So what made 7ticks stand out to the judging panel this year? In a word: everything. The firm made enhancements across the board.

As a low-latency network, expanding access to different marketplaces is always a top priority. This year, 7ticks opened up several new exchange partnerships and co-location relationships. Connectivity was added to the Warsaw Stock Exchange, the Australian Security Exchange and the Australian Liquidity Exchange, to name a few.

7ticks has access to datacenters in New York, London and Tokyo and 18 sites worldwide for proximity hosting and, if possible, co-location services.

Multi-asset solutions were a point of emphasis in 2015. 7ticks’ direct market access (DMA) service added new asset classes and trade support for multi-asset trading strategies. Equities, bonds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), structured products and warrants are all supported by 7ticks.

As a low-latency network, expanding access to different marketplaces is always a top priority. This year, 7ticks opened up several new exchange partnerships and co-location relationships. Connectivity was added to the Warsaw Stock Exchange, the Australian Security Exchange and the Australian Liquidity Exchange, to name a few.

Looking ahead, 7ticks Insight, a web-based client portal launched in September to provide real-time performance data for 7ticks, will be a focus of development. Currently, programmatic access is being added to incident ticketing, order management, and routing systems.

As for the actual infrastructure, the network backbone in North America will be upgraded to 40GB shortly. The Asia-Pacific infrastructure will see an upgrade to 10GB. 7ticks will also be migrated to the Hibernia Express Cable, a transatlantic telecommunications cable run by Hibernia Networks that offers faster routing from London to New York.

The Bedford, Mass.-based firm also plans to upgrade 7ticks’ foreign-exchange (FX) coverage in Europe by adding the LD4 London Matching Engine from Hotspot—now part of the BATS Global Markets family as a result of its acquisition by BATS in March this year—the LDNX regional matching engine from Currenex, and Fastmatch, a foreign exchange (FX) electronic communication network based in New York.