The migration of NYSE Euronext’s European equities and exchange-traded funds to the Universal Trading Platform (UTP) will allow the exchange group to compete more effectively in post-MiFID Europe, according to Roland Bellegarde, group executive vice president and head of European execution at NYSE Euronext.
European equities began trading on UTP, NYSE Euronext’s new single access point and trading engine, on Monday following the switch from the old Nouveau Système de Cotation platform. The migration has cut internal matching engine latency to between 150 and 400 microseconds from 1.5 milliseconds, and the new platform has the capacity to handle 100,000 orders per second.
“Now the platform is up and running, latency and capacity have improved dramatically,” Bellegarde told theTRADEnews.com. “We now have MTFs and a large pool of liquidity in our four domestic markets, all supported by the Universal Trading Platform, so we have all the tools and means to compete in Europe.”
Anthony Attia, executive director and head of the UTP programme, added that customer feedback about the new platform had been good. “Some of our members increased their order flow yesterday because of the lower latency on UTP, and some members declared that from their point of view, UTP was the fastest trading platform in Europe,” he said. “From the performance and latency point of view, UTP allows us to be ahead of the competition in Europe, and those are exactly the kinds of advantages we want to use to gain market share.”
As well as speed and capacity, UTP adds new order types to NYSE Euronext’s European equities trading, including pegged, market-on-close and non-persistent orders.
The company also has order routing capabilities, which will allow users to send orders between NYSE Euronext platforms or route them to external trading venues. “This will allow us to compete on routing whenever it becomes an interesting feature of the European market structure,” said Bellegarde. “We won’t do it automatically, but we have all the tools to do it when required.”
The migration of European equities to UTP follows the transfer of European bonds in 2008, and is part of the NYSE Euronext plans to shift all trading in the US and Europe to UTP. SmartPool, the group’s non-displayed MTF, is already connected. NYSE Arca Europe, the exchange’s displayed-order-book MTF, will be available on UTP when it launches in March. NYSE Arca in the US will migrate to UTP in Q3. NYSE itself will move over to UTP in Q4, and the group will start migrating European derivatives in the same quarter.
“We believe that having one platform with a single access point to all our services provides an advantage to our global clients,” said Attia. “At the end of this migration cycle, having one single platform with one harmonised access will bring cost synergies for clients in terms of infrastructure and network links.”