The London Stock Exchange has confirmed that it will replace
its Tradelect core trading platform with one from Sri Lanka-based
MillenniumIT and will acquire the company for about £18m in the
process.
As Computer Weekly
revealed exclusively earlier this month, the London Stock
Exchange has been in talks with MillenniumIT about using its
technology to replace Tradelect.
The exchange
decided in June to replace Tradelect after recognising that it
is no longer competitive in an increasingly congested market. The
exchange said it could either buy a system or upgrade the current
one.
MillenniumIT will give the exchange a platform that is not used
by a competitor. Only stock exchanges in Europe are competition to
the London exchange.
Xavier Rolet, chief executive of London Stock Exchange Group,
said, "This transaction enables the group to implement a new, more
agile, innovative and efficient IT capability for our future
business development as well as running a new cash trading platform
which will provide substantially lower latency, significantly
higher capacity and improved scalability."
Tradelect was introduced two years ago and developed using
Microsoft's .net Framework. The project to design, build and
implement Tradelect took four years and cost £40m.
Europe's trading venues use about 20 trading platforms. The
company had a limited choice of systems to replace for Tradelect if
it wanted to avoid systems used by rival exchanges.