Currenex Completes Matching Engine Switch

NEW YORK—On the heels of being acquired by State Street, Currenex has completed the migration of its foreign exchange (FX) matching engine to a two-part, high-performance platform designed to reduce latency, DWT has learned.

The first part of the new platform is "a core matching engine that only knows about simple order types," says Sean Gilman, Currenex's chief technology officer (CTO). "Then we have a complex order handler that is tied to a matching engine."

This more complex system runs in a separate server and handles more complex order types, says Gliman. "The concept is that we are able to maintain high throughput and, at the same time, maintain sophisticated features," he says.

The upgrade kicked off on Dec. 18 "on a smaller, phasing-up functionality to a small set of users," Gilman says. The remainder of Currenex's customer base is now live on version 9.0.

Currenex's technology is developed in-house and is Java- and Linux-based. It is "managed on the server side, so the client-side deployment is very lightweight," Gilman says.

"Our service is really an ASP service, so when we deploy a new feature, it goes directly to customers" and is essentially a seamless upgrade, Gilman says.

Customers who log on after an upgrade will have the new features on their desktops but will not be confronted with anything radically different or confusing, he says.

Since Currenex provides direct FX trading capabilities as well as white-labeled solutions, the FX liquidity aggregator tends to roll out upgrades across all of its systems at once, says Gilman.

The new design came at the behest of smaller institutional clients, but larger clients have since taken it up as well, says Gilman.

Additional upgrades include conditional orders, a feature for more rapid spot deals, as well as improved reporting and printing functionality and an offering, dubbed Spot, Nell & Roll, which provides multiple spot trades on a single currency pair.

Earlier this month, State Street agreed to acquire Currenex for $564 million in cash in an effort to expand its holdings in high-growth areas like FX (DWT, Jan. 29). Gilman declines to comment on whether the new platform will be integrated with State Street's FX-trading offering, since the acquisition is not yet complete.

Last year, Currenex launched an open-standard, FIX-based straight-through processing (STP) protocol for FX, money markets and precious metals, dubbed OpenSTP/FX (DWT, Nov. 6, 2006).