Deployment of a Direct Market Access STP solution

Client: One of the Top Five Brokerage houses in Nigeria

Business area: Front Office; Middle Office and Back office (Equities Trading)

Integration: Global Trading (UK, EMEA & USA)

Business Challenge: To lower costs and increase visibility to trade opportunities, the brokerage house initiated a project to develop a direct market access solution for their equities business, with support for multi-leg trading.

The high-level requirements for the system were:

  • Compliance with the highest level of service in stability, performance, and latency
  • Flexibility in modifying and adding data exchange formats
  • Seamless integration with multiple buy-side applications, including algorithmic trading, manual
  • trading & risk management using the IRESS FIX network and the Athena Brokerage application.

Barton Heyman Delivered Implementation: Barton Heyman’s team of business and technical experts designed a system that met all the business requirements and delivered several new business-critical capabilities. The innovative system architecture was designed for optimal performance and stability. The key features of the direct market access solution were:

  • Enhanced support for automated trading using multiple trading connectors to improve performance
  • Straight Through Processing capability using the IRESS Financial Information Exchange (FIX) communication standards for flexibility and scalability
  • Integration of the market data stream using the Athena application.

The Barton Heyman team conducted comprehensive and rigorous reviews and test coverage to ensure system reliability and stability after each release, all of which were delivered on time and within the budget.

Benefits: The trading solution provided the brokerages’ equities and fixed income trading business with the following benefits:

  • Capabilities that support advanced trading strategies and algorithms through the use of new, low-latency connectors
  • reduced costs through integration between the exchanges and the brokerage’s trading and portfolio management applications
  • Significantly improved performance through multiple trading connectors
  • A flexible, scalable system architecture to keep maintenance and support costs low
  • Automated bench marking to maintain optimal system performance.