The London Stock Exchange (LSE) and its multilateral trading facility (MTF), Turquoise, have announced new dates for the migration of customers to the group's new Millennium Exchange trading system. The platform, which replaces the LSE's TradElect and Turquoise's current system, built by Swedish vendor Cinnober, will provide the venues with reduced operating costs and processing times in microseconds not milliseconds.
The new platform was built by Millennium IT, a Sri Lankan IT firm bought by the LSE in October 2009. It is hoped that it will provide an equivalent latency to the exchange's main rival, MTF Chi-X, which is claiming processing speeds of 200 microseconds. By contrast TradElect had a processing speed of 3-4 milliseconds.
That increased speed will allow the LSE to take order flow from high frequency trading firms that rely upon speed of trading. This is reported to make up about 40% of the European equities market.
The migrations to the platform are later than had been planned, due to a potential clash with NYSE Euronext's intended move to its new Basildon data centre in September, which would have caused strains on common customers' IT resources. The LSE and Turquoise changeovers will now take place in November and October 2010 respectively.
Turquoise, which announced a system upgrade in April 2010, said development work on Millennium Exchange is complete and two versions of the platform have been made available for its customer development and test purposes. A number of customers and independent software vendors have already built and tested interfaces to the new platform.
Turquoise commercial director Natan Tiefenbrun said that although the MTF's migration had originally been planned to go live in September, no material change to the process had been made by the decision to avoid a clash with the previously mandated NYSE Euronext migration.
The LSE had also hoped to complete the transition in September 2010, but a spokesperson said it was still in line with the end-of-year deadline originally set by the exchange. The LSE is providing an early access production service allowing certified clients to test their applications on the full Millennium Exchange production environment and to ensure any connectivity issues are resolved prior to planned dress rehearsals.
Turquoise says that its ”full and final' environment for customer development/testing and self certification will be available on 19 July, with its first customer dress rehearsal on the 11 September, and the second on 18 September 2010.
Its ”go live' date is planned for 4 October, with a contingency date set for 18 October. These are expected to be confirmed in mid-August following testing and an assessment of customer readiness.
The LSE will launch its self certification service on the 26 July, with its early access production service open from 20 September. Its dress rehearsals for migration will now be held on 9 and 23 of October, with a go live date of 1 November and a contingency of 15 November 2010.