In Crisis, NYSE's IT Offerings Appeal to New Customers
Commercial technology unit built on solid foundation, says NYSE Technologies CEO
April 13, 2009
As chief executive of NYSE Technologies, Stanley Young is guiding NYSE Euronext's efforts to sell its technology and operational capabilities to trading venues and market participants. In a financial crisis where IT budgets are being slashed, the exchange operator's hosted network and trading infrastructure are proving to be good for business.
"Our focus at the moment is on ensuring that all components of our current portfolio are performing to their highest capabilities," says Young, who is also co-global chief information officer of NYSE Euronext--dual roles he calls "highly complementary." The commercial technology unit aims to ensure that its "foundation is built on rock-solid technology," he says, as it goes up against competitors like Nasdaq OMX Group, Thomson Reuters and BT.
Young, previously chairman and CEO of AEMS, has also served as worldwide director of financial markets for Hewlett-Packard Co. and spent 11 years at the London Stock Exchange, where he focused on strategy development and implemented trading systems.
The year-old NYSE unit that Young leads is the product of several acquisitions over the last several years, combining the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) connectivity network, data management technology vendor Wombat Financial Software, enterprise messaging systems provider TransactTools and Atos Euronext Markets Solutions (AEMS), a trading and clearing platform company that Euronext co-founded in 2005. When NYSE Euronext bought consulting and integration firm Atos Origin's 50 percent stake in AEMS in late 2007, the exchange operator acquired the NSC cash trading and Liffe Connect derivatives trading technology.
In February, NYSE Technologies upgraded the Liffe Connect platform for NYSE Liffe U.S., the futures exchange it launched last fall. In an interview with Securities Industry News, Young, previously chairman and CEO of AEMS, discussed the Liffe Connect enhancements, NYSE's move to a single trading system--the Universal Trading Platform (UTP)--the expansion of the SFTI network, and how the downturn is affecting business.
You recently finished upgrading NYSE Liffe U.S.'s trading platform. What were some of the major changes?
Essentially, we took a previous version of Liffe Connect running on NYSE Liffe U.S. and we upgraded it to our latest version--called v10--which also powers our NYSE Liffe derivatives market in Europe. Functionally, it's very similar to the old version used by the Chicago Board of Trade, but v10 is much faster and includes enhanced collocation abilities. In addition, we took the opportunity to introduce two components from our Universal Trading Platform [UTP] architecture--the Exchange Data Publisher for market data dissemination and the Common Customer Gateway. By doing this we are "future-proofing" the solution to enable an easier migration to UTP in the future.
What were the synergies between NYSE Liffe's technology team and NYSE Technologies?
They are both, in effect, one and the same team. We tend to think of all of our technology resources as being fungible across the NYSE Euronext corporate entity. This project was delivered by a combination of the application team in London and the operations and infrastructure team from the U.S. It's a real-world example of our global enterprise working together in a highly effective and efficient manner.
With SFTI connecting to Direct Edge last month, the network now covers the entire displayed U.S. equities market. Are you looking to replicate that in Europe?
