Bear Stearns & Co. has chosen Wombat Financial Software’s market data infrastructure, known as the Wombat Platform, as part of its effort to minimize latency delays in its automated trading systems.
The New York-based brokerage, which is using the Wombat Platform to normalize and reistribute its market data feeds at submillisecond speeds, was experiencing latencies in “multiple seconds” before installing the new technology, said Ron Verstappen, CEO of Incline Village, Nev.-based Wombat.
Wombat was implemented by Bear Stearns’ equities analytics and systematic trading division in New York, according to Wombat, which also noted that Bear chose Wombat’s over other low-latency solutions based on the breadth and strength of an offering that combines direct exchange-feed handlers, high-speed messaging and application integration capabilities.
“Wombat has enabled Bear Stearns to consistently focus on our business of providing best execution to institutional investors by largely removing the complexities of coping with data feed integration,” said Jerome Downey, senior managing director of Bear Stearns. “They’ve proven themselves to be a viable alternative in the market data management arena,” he added.
Wombat noted that the system has been “in production” for more than a year at Bear Stearns, which has also integrated Wombat with value-added applications for data storage, analytics and publishing.
“We believe latency is a big factor in the success we’re having,” said Verstappen. Merrill Lynch & Co. and Wombat announced a “strategic relationship” last November, signifying that Wombat would supply the market data infrastructure for the brokerage giant’s electronic trading platform.
Another adopter of the high-speed data feed technology is EdgeTrade, a New York broker-dealer and software developer that stresses its neutrality in electronic execution for clients. It recently licensed Wombat’s market data infrastructure for its Execution Management System, and Wombat this month formally released a feed handler for the Bloomberg B-Pipe that is integratable with the Wombat Platform and other market-data distribution systems.
“Customer satisfaction is what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from the crowd, and in that vein we are most pleased to make this announcement of a successful customer deployment with a leader like Bear Stearns,” said Verstappen. “Wombat’s unwavering focus is to provide a comprehensive, well-engineered product line for handling and distributing high-speed market data with the lowest possible latency.”