BrokerTec Brings World Class Trading Platform to U.S. Fixed Income Market

NEW YORK and LONDON, April 18, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ICAP, the world's leading interdealer broker, announced that its electronic fixed income business BrokerTec has successfully launched with its customers a new trading system for its U.S. based products using a modified version of the NASDAQ OMX Genium INET system. The new system provides very low latency and high throughput, as well as built in capabilities for manual traders.

The upgraded BrokerTec trading platform retains all the functionality previously available on the system, and is built using technology which enables BrokerTec to increase order volume tenfold and decrease order input latency by as much as 50 times in some cases. The platform's average latency is now less than 200 microseconds, with previous average latency approximately 10 milliseconds. 

BrokerTec will complete its global upgrade by the end of April.

Dan Cleaves, Head of BrokerTec U.S., said: "We're very pleased to have successfully launched the new BrokerTec platform in the U.S. All BrokerTec customers, including both manual and API traders, will now benefit from substantially increased performance and greatly enhanced user experience. I'd like to sincerely thank all our customers, partners, ICAP staff, and our BrokerTec team led by BrokerTec CIO Arthur D'Arcy, for their hard work and patience in making this project a success."

Ravit Mandell, Head of J.P. Morgan Quantitative Market Making, said: "It has been a pleasure working with BrokerTec on the launch of the new Genium INET system – they kept us well informed, met their dates, and the new low latency platform has a balance between the needs of the manual trader and those utilizing automated trading tools."

Steve Yu, Director of Rates and E Trading Technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said: "The markets we trade in require the most sophisticated platforms available. We're very happy with BrokerTec's new system, and the switchover happened on time and without a hitch. Given the emphasis on speed and reliability, we feel confident the BrokerTec system will continue to meet our short and long term trading needs."

Ann Neidenbach, Senior Vice President of Global Software Development at NASDAQ OMX, said: "ICAP's BrokerTec is a premier global platform in the fixed-income markets, and we are pleased that they recognize the multi-asset capability of Genium INET as well as benefits in latency, scalability and performance improvements."

About NASDAQ OMX

The inventor and transformer of the electronic exchange, The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc., fuels economies with revolutionary technologies for the entire lifecycle of a trade - from risk management to trade to surveillance to clearing. In the US and Europe, we own and operate 24 markets, 3 clearinghouses and 6 central securities depositories supporting equities, options, fixed income, derivatives, commodities, futures and structured products. Able to process more than 1 million messages per second at sub-80 microsecond speeds with 99.999% uptime, our technology drives more than 70 exchanges in 50 developed and emerging countries into the future, powering 1 in 10 of the world's securities transactions. Our award-winning data products and worldwide indexes are the benchmarks in the financial industry. Home to 3,400 listed companies worth $5.1 trillion in market cap whose innovations shape our world, we give the ideas of tomorrow access to capital today. Welcome to where the world takes a big leap forward, daily. Welcome to the NASDAQ OMX Century. To learn more, visit www.nasdaqomx.com. Follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/NASDAQ) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/nasdaqomx). (Symbol: NDAQ and member of S&P 500).

About ICAP

ICAP is the world's leading interdealer broker and provider of post trade risk and information services. The Group matches buyers and sellers in the wholesale markets in interest rates, credit, commodities, FX, emerging markets and equity derivatives through voice and electronic networks. Through our post trade risk and information services we help our customers manage and mitigate risks in their portfolios. For more information go to www.icap.com.

ICAP's BrokerTec platform is the leading electronic trading platform for the fixed income markets and provides innovative technology solutions across a wide range of products to more than 500 customers in over 50 countries. It includes trading solutions for many U.S. and European fixed income products, including U.S. Treasuries, European Government Bonds and European Repo, and facilitates both API (black box) and manual trading for institutions, banks and non-bank professional trading organizations.

 CONTACT: Brigitte TraffordICAP          +44 (0)20 7050 7103          Guy TaylorICAP          +001 212 341 9759          Robert Madden          NASDAQ OMX          +001 646 441 5045

Source: ICAP