Virginia-based Global Trade Technologies (GTT) has piloted the integration of its new XML Web services platform for fixed-income broker/dealers with the Microsoft .NET Framework.
"We chose Microsoft's .NET Framework to be the basis for our XML Web services platform due to its scalability, stability and implementation of open industry standards," says Ed Gulley, chief technology officer for GTT.
GTT's new XML Web services platform will aim to provide straight-through processing (STP) services and real-time access to third-party fixed-income inventories to the company's broker/dealer enterprise customers. The first phase of deployment for the XML Web services platform will allow GTT to leverage a common technology interface for distributing numerous products from Merrill Lynch's global fixed-income inventory.
GTT represents one of a number of in-house and third-party channels Merrill Lynch will use to distribute bond inventories to the financial services community, according to John Walsh, vice president of wholesaling technology at Merrill Lynch.
The XML Web services platform uses the Simple Object Access Protocol (Soap) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) based documents to deliver inventories based on user or firm filter criteria. The platform supports both downloads to GTT's broker/dealer enterprise sales and trading system and real-time views for subscribers to GTT's planned fixed-income hosted platform.