BOAT, a consortium of nine investment banks launched to create a central platform for pre- and post-trade market data, has selected BT Radianz and COLT as client connectivity and infrastructure hosting partners.
BT Radianz provides connectivity and hosting to the global financial services community. COLT is a European provider of communications services to businesses using its wholly-owned network and fourteen data centres.
The infrastructure solution was developed by Cinnober, BOAT’s technology partner, and the selection of BT Radianz and COLT to host BOAT’s technology will ensure the trade reporting and OTC pre-trade price transparency platform is available to a broad community of dealers, investment managers and data vendors around the world.
BOAT will collect, validate, store, manage and distribute the requisite European equity quote and trade report data over a cost-effective, real-time platform. This will enable it to meet its contributors’ trade data reporting and OTC pre-trade price transparency requirements under MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive).
The decision to have BOAT’s data hosting in two different sites in London will ensure the platform has low latency and is resilient, flexible and fully redundant to guarantee business continuity. The BOAT application system will be hosted at the London data centres of BT Radianz and COLT, which are situated 14.5 kilometres apart with databases synchronised between both sites. Contributors and distributors will be able to connect to the platform via either provider, or both.
“BOAT is pleased to announce the appointment of BT Radianz and COLT as hosting partners,” says Duncan Paterson, managing partner of Cygnet Consulting, speaking on behalf of BOAT. “Both companies have excellent track records in hosting mission critical platforms, and the choice of two separate hosting centres will ensure BOAT has the highest quality of continuity.”
He adds, “This represents the achievement of another key milestone in the BOAT platform which now has all its major service provider partners in place. Contributors can be confident that we will have a robust and easily accessible solution for the pan-European market well ahead of the introduction of MiFID.”
In January this year, BOAT announced the appointment of Markit Group Limited and Cinnober Financial Technology as business and technology partners respectively.
BOAT was formed in September 2006 by nine leading investment banks –
ABN AMRO, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS. It was launched to create a central platform for the collection, collation, validation, storage and distribution of pre- and post-trade information as required by investment firms operating off-exchange as allowed under MiFID.