Share trading platform Turquoise, which went live on friday,
expects to have 50 major investment firms using its service by
mid-September.
The pan European trading platform, which was established by nine
major investment banks, was soft launched last week. It is quoting
10 sets of shares in the UK and Germany in preperation for its full
launch in mid-September.
Turquoise is one of a number of new stock exchanges that will
benefit from the EU's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive,
introduced in November.
A spokesman at Turquoise said the platform will have about 50
investment banks using its services by its full launch around
mid-September. "There are 100 or so big traders that this is
designed for and we expect the majority of these to sign up by the
end of the year."
Some 14 investment firms were using its trading service when
Turquoise went live on Friday last week. By Monday the number had
increased to 20.
The platform's launch followed
four months of testing and 22 months of planning. Turquoise
took six months to build the technology infrastructure using
off-the-shelf software.
Bob McDowall, analyst at Towergroup, said from now until
Turquoise's full blown launch the company will be learning about
the technology and processes. He said that Turquoise's use of
packaged software and commodity hardware means that it will be able
to grow with demand.
"This business is all about volumes and Turquoise has the
capability to start small and can scale up rapidly in response to
demand because of its choice of technology," he said.
Turquoise's use of packaged software makes replacing componants
easier and cheaper compared with the cost of developing them
internally. Its use of inexpensive servers from suppliers such as
Hewlett-Packard means it can increase capacity easily.
Turqouse IT infrastructure
Turquoise is using
off-the-shelf technology, including its
core trading platform from supplier Cinnober, and a combination
of
Progress Software and Detica technology for its market
surveillance application. It uses software from Neonet to
provide market data and EuroCCP for clearing and settlement
services. The infrastructure is housed in two datacentres run by
financial services IT service provider BT Radianz and is made up of
HP blade servers running on a Red Hat Linux operating system.