BSO Preps Network, Office Expansion to Meet Growing Asia Demand

Demand has been particularly high in Dubai, India, Shanghai, among other locations, as well as to support markets creating trading links between market centers such as London, Tokyo, New York, and Singapore, says Matthew Lempriere, head of Asia Pacific at BSO, who recently joined the vendor from Australian telecoms provider Telstra to lead the Hong Kong office. “It was the right time to open offices in both Hong Kong and Singapore to take advantage of that,” he says.

Much of the demand is being driven by an influx of trading activity to banks in the region, resulting from MSCI’s recent decision to include 234 Chinese A shares in its flagship emerging markets index, which will require increased connectivity services between other Asian market centers and Shanghai.

“With Asia still being the area of growth, China being more and more important every day, foreign exchange volumes increasing across Tokyo and… Singapore, it makes the whole Asia market attractive to the American and European communities,” Lempriere says. “We’ve got super-fast routes into the Shanghai Futures Exchange, to Tokyo, and out to the CME. There’s so much more demand for those kinds of routes now.” 

In addition to Lempriere, BSO has relocated sales director Tom Fulford-Brown from London to lead the Singapore office and support BSO’s priority of onboarding more clients in Asia. Lempriere says the vendor will first build up its customer base in the region before looking at hiring more people and potentially investing in new technologies to further improve latency.

One such effort could see BSO roll out microwave connectivity services in the region, where relevant for clients. In January, BSO acquired Apsara Networks, a supplier of wireless connectivity to financial markets that operates a microwave route connecting Nasdaq, NYSE and Bats co-location centers in New Jersey, for an undisclosed sum.

Lempiere says clients have expressed demand for microwave links—for example, from datacenters in Tokyo to the cable landing station in Japan, which is a couple of hundred kilometers from Equinix’s and BSO’s Tokyo facilities.

“There has been demand for it in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore, too. We will have to see whether the business case stacks up to do this. We are investigating to see how that works and what the customer demand is, how much latency savings we can achieve, and how we can best roll that kind of capability out,” Lempriere says.