Following yesterday’s glitch in a firewall at Turquoise, a pan-European multilateral trading facility, which disrupted trading for “a few minutes” for some users, the platform has taken steps to prevent further problems.
“We have upgraded the firewall’s operating system to the latest version,” Duncan Higgins, Turquoise’s head of client relationship management, told theTRADEnews.com. “We haven’t seen the same issue recur today but we are going to increase the number of firewalls we have and spread users across a greater number of firewalls – essentially load-balancing across a larger number of firewalls.”
There was a glitch with the firewall on Turquoise’s primary site, prompting a launch of the backup firewall. Users had to disconnect and reconnect to the backup firewall. “Some did it within 50 milliseconds, and some took a bit longer if they were manually reconnecting,” said Higgins, adding that some of those reconnecting manually took “a few minutes” to reconnect. “Most people were within a couple of minutes; others took maybe less than 10 but it was dependent on how they were structured to reconnect,” he said.
Higgins downplayed the impact of the hitch on trading. “There was minimal disruption on people’s ability to trade. It was not a big issue for us or members,” he said. “Both we and our clients have planned for this exact eventuality. Both our and their recovery processes are coordinated so it doesn’t impact either their ability to trade or smart order route.”
He added that buy-side trades were largely unaffected. “Due to the rapid reconnect by members and the early stage of Turquoise's development the impact on the buy-side would have been negligible,” he said.
Turquoise is currently in the final stages of its soft launch, which has seen it gradually ramp up the number of stocks and markets it trades in. Trading in all 13 markets and 1,267 stocks began on 29 August. Turquoise’s members are now increasing the amount of business they transact on the platform.
Higgins argued that the glitch could be seen as positive, because it will make the platform more resilient in future. “This happening in our build up phase is an opportunity for us to have some glitches highlighted to us, and they won’t recur because we will address then where we find them.”
The Turquoise platform will begin its full production phase on 5 September. It began its launch phase on August 15.