ICAP, an inter-dealer broker, has announced that it has completed the most recent phase of enhancements to its EBS Spot FX electronic trading platform. ICAP says these enhancements improve the system's functionality, increase the frequency of market view updates and speed of data delivery, and provide greater order book transparency for all EBS customers.
The first step in the upgrade of the EBS platform involved a network and hardware upgrade to Linux which has contributed to a 75 percent improvement in global average deal times since January 2007, says the firm. Intra-regional deals, for example London - London or New York - New York, are on average now completed in 5 - 8 milliseconds.
"We have worked hard to make the EBS platform more efficient, reliable and deterministic," comments David Rutter, deputy CEO, ICAP Electronic Broking. "We want traders to be confident that they will get their business done at all times, in all market conditions," he adds.
ICAP has recently reduced the price distribution interval (time slicing) on the EBS platform by 50 percent to 500 milliseconds for all EBS customers. Customers of EBS Live, the EBS FX market data feed, have also seen price update frequency increase to once every 250 milliseconds, up from once every 500 milliseconds. Latency on EBS Live data transmission has been reduced from 95 milliseconds to 5 milliseconds since Q1 2007.
"In anticipation of continued growth and increased adoption of electronic FX trading in 2008, ICAP is determined to introduce more enhancements designed to help today's traders adapt to the constantly evolving FX marketplace," explains Rutter.