Activ Preps Fixed-Income Data, Expands FX

Low-latency data provider Activ Financial is planning to add fixed income data from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board and FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) to its consolidated feed, as part of an ongoing content expansion across asset classes to meet demand from high-frequency trading clients.

The vendor plans to initially add the MSRB’s Real-Time Transaction Reporting System feed of trade price data, as well as FINRA’s Agency Debt Trade Dissemination Service and Bond Trade Dissemination Service datafeeds, before expanding to more specific instrument detail, reference data and other terms and conditions information that fixed-income traders find valuable, says Activ president Frank Piasecki.

The data will also be available via the vendor’s ActivFeed MPU (Market data Processing Unit) hardware-accelerated ticker plant. Piasecki says that while Activ initially focused on increasing throughput and lowering clients’ hardware footprint and total cost of ownership with its appliance, MPU can now also deliver single-digit microsecond processing latency, which is important for firms that already connect to low-latency equities, options and futures data via Activ, and are looking to expand their use of the vendor’s technology to support additional asset classes.

Activ is also expanding its foreign exchange content—which it began building out late last year with datafeeds from electronic FX trading platforms HotspotFX, EBS, FXall and Currenex (IMD, July 9, 2010)—by developing new feed handlers for feeds of FX rates from dealer firms, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland and Société Générale, Piasecki adds.

Overall, the combined expansion into new asset classes—combined with the publishing access points on its proprietary middleware component that enable clients to distribute internal data over its systems—further strengthens Activ’s enterprise value proposition as “a supplier of broad, ultra-low-latency content… and a messaging backbone to support large-scale data distribution requirements, for delivering real-time data internally across the enterprise and also out to the firm’s clients,” Piasecki says.