Buy-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Low-Latency Network—Ullink

Richard Bentley, chief product officer at Ullink, says the firm’s Nyfix low-latency platform provides buy-side firms with a stable and predictable network on which they can rely when trading. “We’ve put a lot of investment into Nyfix in a number of different areas like new regional hubs in Asia and Europe, which improves regional performance for our participants there,” Bentley says. “I think our customers really care about the quality of our service and how many brokers we have, but it’s more about the quality aspect and the speed that we can onboard new brokers, performance, robustness, reliability, and security.”

Bentley adds that there has been no downtime on the network for the past decade. That predictability extends to the firm’s cybersecurity features. It recently upgraded its security on the network and is now fully compliant with global cybersecurity standards. Bentley says it was also important that the firm set up regional hubs in Asia and Europe to meet demand, and recently went live with hubs in Tokyo, Singapore, London, and Paris. 

However, the biggest enhancement to Nyfix is the network’s post-trade services to the buy side, particularly as many corporates are moving to a faster post-trade world. “Something that we’ve been focusing on for a while is the delivery of new services to all clients connected to our community,” Bentley says. “One of the services we rolled out was to help clients with post-trade workflows—they can use the same connection that they have to brokers to automate and streamline the whole pre-clearing workflow, as the time from execution to settlement continues to shrink.”

To that end, Ullink partnered with Alpha Omega to white label and distribute technology to allow buy-side firms to automate the allocation and confirmation of trades. For Bentley, low-latency networks do not exist merely to make trading faster—they help create better workflows, especially as straight through automation becomes a greater area of focus for capital markets firms. To meet this demand, Ullink is also building out a single-access platform for many services for clients. It already offers some analytics, operational monitoring and what is essentially a directory for buy-side clients to find brokers that trade in products and markets they are already involved in.