ICAP, the interdealer broker, has announced significant changes to its EBS Live data feed.
EBS Live is a real-time spot FX market data feed and is designed for banks and professional FX trading organisations. First among the changes are improvements to processing latency, the speed at which data is generated in the system. Processing latency has become increasingly important as customer pricing engines, black box trading models and risk management tools become more sophisticated.
ICAP has also improved EBS Live communications latency, or the speed at which data moves within the network architecture, through an upgrade of the EBS distributed global architecture. Taken together, these two modifications have reduced total latency in data distribution by approximately 95 percent.
ICAP will also shortly pilot a streaming protocol, Fast FIX. Fast FIX compresses market data messages, further reducing transmission latency, or the time it takes for data to reach customers’ systems. ICAP anticipates that the Fast FIX protocol will reduce transmission latency by 10 percent.
“The growing number of bank and non-bank professional FX traders using EBS Live need the fastest possible access to our transactional market data,” says John Nixon, CEO of ICAP Electronic Broking. “We have reduced latency at each critical stage to better satisfy our customers’ need for efficient and effective data delivery.”