Thomson Reuters Expands Elektron Real Time to Frankfurt

Thomson Reuters is making its Elektron Real Time low-latency consolidated datafeed available to German trading firms and regional market participants via Frankfurt-based datacenters, to provide full market depth data from more than 350 exchanges and and over-the-counter markets worldwide, after expanding the service to Chicago earlier this year (IMD, July 23, 2012). 

The feed will be accessible via two electronic network access points located in datacenter provider Equinix’s FR2 datacenter in the north of Frankfurt, and its FR4 center to the west of the city, providing customers with a choice of connectivity points and ensuring the service is not subject to any single point of failure, officials say. 

Thomson Reuters will now be able to offer full-depth information from local exchanges such as Deutsche Börse’s Xetra and Eurex cash and derivatives platforms, and regional exchanges—including warrant and certificates hub Börse Stuttgart—along with prices from 350 other global sources via a local point-of-presence, where previously Level 2 data was sourced from locations outside of Germany.

“One of the reasons we felt strongly about having a point-of-presence in Frankfurt is because there is a lot of regional data, and we want to make sure people in the region can get to that data faster than before, where it was typically sourced from London or via datacenters in Switzerland,” says Ralf Roth, global head of equities, feeds and platform at Thomson Reuters, who adds that the vendor is guaranteeing latency of no more than four milliseconds for clients located within 40km of an Elektron point of presence in any metro center—a “dramatic” reduction from the vendor’s previous latency figures in Frankfurt, which Roth says were in the double-digit millisecond range, though he declines to give specific figures. 

 
Roth says Thomson Reuters decided to expand Elektron Real Time to Frankfurt because of the city’s position as important financial center in Continental Europe, the presence of local exchanges, and the availability of infrastructure. Local clients had also asked the vendor to improve the latency and breadth of data available in Frankfurt, he adds. 

Thomson Reuters also plans to launch a hosted version of the service by year-end, to cater to smaller shops that don’t want to deploy a lot of proprietary infrastructure. “Some smaller clients only have 10 seats and want to consume 2,000 instruments, so we are trying to come up with an attractive proposition that just requires a virtual private network to connect and consume data,” Roth adds.