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Winterflood Securities: leading market maker settles on an innovative solution
In global equities, communication is crucial during the entire execution cycle from pre-trade right through to settlement. When issues with their old messaging platform started to impact operations, Wayne Davies, Head of Networks and Infrastructure at Winterflood Securities considered alternative solutions.
Processing some 47,000 trades every day, Winterflood Securities is Europe’s leading market maker. Supporting 450 customers on 41 trading venues across 17 countries, it’s traded almost 200 billion shares to date.
Winterflood Securities decided to move to the BT SettleNET managed messaging platform around two years ago. Wayne Davies explains: “We had issues with our old messaging system, needing to spend more and more time to keep messages flowing. Also its commercial terms were inflexible, with financial penalties should volumes drop below a certain threshold”.
BT SettleNET provides a reliable message exchange service
designed to
meet financial markets’ rigorous requirements
for security, scalability
and compliance
BT SettleNET, part of the BT Radianz Messaging portfolio, is a managed service linking financial institutions with CREST – the central securities depository for the electronic settlement of UK, Irish and international securities, operated by Euroclear UK & Ireland. BT SettleNET provides a reliable message exchange service designed to meet financial markets’ rigorous requirements for security, scalability and compliance.
The pricing structure delivers commercial advantages too. “With a fixed price per 100 kilobytes of data and most messages of a standard size our settlement costs are now more predictable,” says Wayne Davies. “They vary with trading volume, which helps safeguard our profitability regardless of market conditions.”
The BT-hosted platform operates from two different sites for added resilience, while advanced security features ensure confidentiality and authentication along with non-repudiation. The platform is simple to use and offers a well-defined file transfer interface to simplify back office connectivity.
Winterflood is also a customer of BT Radianz Cloud and, whereas the previous messaging platform used dedicated circuits, BT SettleNET makes the most of the Radianz connectivity. That offers significant network cost savings. “By moving to BT SettleNET our network costs have reduced by around two-thirds,” confirms Wayne Davies.
Switching to BT SettleNET has proven to be a wise decision. “We’ve been very impressed with SettleNET,” concludes Wayne Davies. “It’s been so reliable we’ve had zero problems over the two years we’ve been using it”. In fact, Winterflood has recently confirmed its commitment to BT SettleNET with a five-year contract extension.
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