Telecommunications firm COLT’s new proximity services offering has got its first customer. In February, COLT announced it had teamed up with German stock exchange Deutsche Börse to offer proximity services to members of Deutsche Börse’s trading platforms. Proximity services are designed allow trading firms to place their order management systems as close to exchanges as possible to reduce latency.
“We signed up the first client of Deutsche Börse last week,” says Ian Jack, business development manager for financial services at COLT. “It is a large sell-side European bank.” He declined to name the bank.
COLT intends to expand its proximity services offering beyond Deutsche Börse and Germany. “We are looking at rolling it out to other exchanges,” says Jack. “We have 14 data centres in Europe and all are close to exchanges.”
Under the proximity services offering with Deutsche Börse, COLT provides data centre hosting services that enable customers to host their servers closer to the exchange and across different data centres.