Quant House Plans Asia Network

Quant House has already begun developing feed handlers for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s cash equity and futures markets, but officials say the software development is not the main challenge in securing low-latency access to data from Asian markets.

“The more complex part is the extension of the network,” says Stéphane Leroy, global head of sales and marketing for Quant House. “Networks in Asia are very fragmented and sometimes not reliable, so it’s taking some time to get it all worked out,” he adds.

Eventually, the vendor plans to install Points of Presence (PoPs) in three major Asian financial centers—Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, which will act as collection centers for providing Asian data to Quant House’s clients worldwide, and will also provide local clients in these cities with access to low-latency market data from local markets as well as Europe and the US, Leroy says.

The vendor plans to complete its network expansion during the first half of 2008, and is currently seeking dark fiber suppliers in the region to provide the underlying cabling for its network. “We’re buying directly from dark fiber providers so that we will be able to manage our own network directly and control the end-to-end process,” Leroy says.

Although Quant House doesn’t currently support an Asian office, its main shareholder Fimat has offices in all of the cities where Quant House aims to locate its PoPs, which could be used to support the vendor’s datacenters, Leroy says.

Jean-Paul Carbonnie