The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has revealed initial plans to migrate customers to Millennium Exchange, its new trading platform, before the end of September 2010.
The new platform is being developed by Sri-Lankan IT firm MillenniumIT, which the LSE acquired in October 2009 for US$30 million.
According to a technical specification document sent to the LSE’s members, early testing will start next month, will full testing and dress rehearsals from June onwards. The current plans are subject to change and only include details of switching from the current TradElect platform to Millennium Exchange for UK cash markets. The exchange said performance details, in terms of capacity and latency, would be clearer once the testing phase starts.
“We have only been testing the performance in a lab-environment so far,” a spokesperson for the LSE told theTRADEnews.com. “When we begin full testing we will have a better idea of the system’s performance using current levels of UK cash equities trading.”
Migration details of other platforms using TradElect, including Borsa Italiana, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the LSE’s bond segment, will be communicated at a later date, as will plans for Turquoise, the bank-owned multilateral trading facility that the exchange took over at the end of last year. At the time of the Turquoise deal, the LSE said it had targeted February for the launch of the new venture created from the merger of Turquoise with Baikal, the LSE’s dark trading initiative.
“The Turquoise transaction is still awaiting regulatory approval and the next steps for integration will be dependent on receiving this approval beforehand,” added the spokesman.
The spokesperson also confirmed that Oslo Børs would continue with its plans to use TradElect instead of migrating to the new system. Oslo Børs had initially planned to switch from its current platform to TradElect this month following a memorandum of understanding signed with the LSE in December 2008. However, the Norwegian exchange delayed the migration until 12 April to give customers more time to prepare for the switchover.
The LSE’s technology has come under heavy scrutiny in recent months following a number of outages, the most serious of which occurred on 26 November when trading was suspended for three-and-a-half hours.