The LSE has racked up another couple of successes for its Millennium technology business, winning a contract with the Hong Kong Exchange and completing a rollout at Oslo Børs.
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) has selected MillenniumIT's multi-asset-class gateway platform. Millennium SOR will drive the HKEx Orion Central Gateway, billed as an "ultra-low latency and high throughput" platform.
The gateway - to be rolled out late next year - is the second building block in the Hong Kong bourse's Orion programme, a massive US$380 million, three year, tech overhaul.
The gateway will offer brokers the choice of a binary interface or standard FIX 5.0 option, and will introduce several new features such as a drop copy service. The system is designed to simplify HKEx's market access architecture, with brokers able to reduce infrastructure costs to access securities market systems by consolidating telecoms circuits and eliminating physical hardware in their premises.
To enable firms to migrate at their own pace, the new gateway will be introduced in parallel with HKEx's existing access infrastructure, and the current architecture will remain in operation until at least 2015.
Julian Ragless, SVP, platform development and strategy, HKEx, says: "In evaluating service providers, we applied a stringent set of requirements in terms of performance and functionality. We selected the Millennium SOR based on its capability to handle a high level of order throughput with microsecond levels of latency and high availability."
Meanwhile, Norwegian Exchange operator, Oslo Børs this week migrated to the Millennium Exchange trading platform. The exchange will also move Sweden's Burgundy trading platform, which it acquired in October, to Millennium next year.
The LSE acquired Sri Lanka's MillenniumIT for around £18 million in 2009. In addition to rolling out the vendor's technology itself, the London bourse wanted to give itself a potentially lucrative new revenue source, belatedly joining Nyse Euronext and Nasdaq OMX in having its own technology arm that could sell systems to third parties.
This strategy has begun to pay off, with MillenniumIT now installed at more than 30 exchanges around the world, including recent migrations at Borsa Italiana, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Mongolian Stock Exchange.