Turquoise the alternative stock trading venue set up by
investment banks to take on national stock exchanges is now fully
operational following a soft launched last month.
The company was launched by firms including Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley to compete with stock exchanges across Europe.
The company has been implementing off-the-shelf software IT for
six months to ensure the trading platform is competitive in a
fast-moving sector. The launch followed four
months of testing and 22 months of planning.
About 30 investment firms are currently using Turquoise. A
spokesman at Turquoise said there are 100 or so big traders that
the platform is designed to attract, adding "We expect the majority
of these to sign up by the end of the year."
Turquoise has used packaged software to make replacing
components easier and cheaper compared with the cost of developing
them internally. It also uses inexpensive servers from suppliers
such as Hewlett-Packard so it can increase capacity easily.
Eli Lederman, CEO at Turquoise, said, "Controlled roll out means
that Turquoise has been introduced responsible and we are pleased
with initial market share gains."
Jon Cosson, head of IT at Stockbroker JM Finn, welcomed any
additional trading venue.
He said the company is always looking for alternative venues to
complete trades. "Any thing that can reduce the cost of trading is
a good thing."
Turquoise 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.