The London Stock Exchange will shut down the trading system it
acquired from Borsa Italiana in the first half of next year, as
part of its plan to save £20m by combiningits UK and Italian
operations.
The stock exchange took over
Borsa Italiana's Affari trading system when it bought the Milan
based stock exchange for £1.63bn.
The LSEsaid it expected to save £20m from the merger - split
equally between IT and non-IT related savings - by
2010.Thisincludes moving all trades to the London Stock Exchange's core
trading platform,
Tradelect.
The firm this week transferred a total of 360 company shares
listed on the Italian system to Tradelect. It said it will complete
the migration of all trading in the first half of 2009.
Massimo Capuano, deputy chief executive of the London Stock
Exchange Group, said this is a major step in the integration of
Borsa Italiana and the London Stock Exchange. "Our Italian member
firms in particular will benefit from improved system performance
and the opportunity to employ new technical trading strategies
which have been driving record volume growth in London."
The London Stock Exchange Group reported a record number of
trades in October at 29.6 million. This was 55% more than the same
period last year.But the value traded was down 18% to £246.1bn
because of falls in the value of FTSE 100 and its Italian
equivalent. The average daily number of trades during October was
1.3 million.
The company completed the implementation of Tradelect in July
2007, ending a £40m, four-year IT programme. Tradelect reduced the
time taken to complete a trade from 140 milliseconds to 10
milliseconds and was able to process 2,500 orders a second rather
than 593 under the previous system. Following several upgrades it
now completes trades in three milliseconds and can handle 10.000
trades a second.