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The American Stock Exchange (Amex) is using connectivity services from Transaction Network Services (TNS), say Amex officials. Amex will use TNS to provide its customers with market data and order flow submission to the exchange. The new services went live last week when Amex launched its new electronic trading platform dubbed Auction and Electronic Market Integration (AEMI) (see page 5). Amex is looking to acquire more market share by using TNS, according to Antoine Shagoury, Amex's chief information officer (CIO).

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) will offer side-by-side open outcry and electronic trading for most of its foreign exchange (FX) options on futures. On Dec. 18, nine CME FX options will be available for 23 hours per day via CME's Globex electronic transaction platform. That number will expand in 2007, CME says. About 90 percent of CME's FX volume is done electronically, and this growth makes options "an increasingly important part of our business," says Derek Sammann, managing director for CME FX.

Fidelity Capital Markets Services launched an alternative trading system (ATS), dubbed CrossStream, that targets dark liquidity in an effort to guarantee best execution for clients, say officials at the unit of Fidelity Brokerage Co. The CrossStream platform will anonymously match buy and sell orders from the multiple channels that comprise the order flow for Fidelity Brokerage.

Equinet Securities, a Frankfurt-based investment bank for the small and mid-cap segments, is slated to deploy UL Bridge and UL Net from Ullink, say officials at the firm. Equinet Securities will combine both solutions to build a connectivity architecture able to answer its growing business needs. Equinet uses the UL Bridge to connect directly to a German exchange, enabling the company to offer low-latency direct market access (DMA) services to its customers. With UL Net, the firm will be able to send and receive order flow from the other members of the service while UL Net is a FIX hub.

Swedish exchange operator and technology vendor OMX signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Zagreb Stock Exchange. The deal will see the two firms collaborate in areas of technology and product development. The Zagreb Stock Exchange will exploit OMX's position as a supplier of marketplace technology and as a driver behind the integration of the regional market in the Nordic and Baltic regions. The ultimate goal behind the deal is to develop the Croatian capital markets and raise Croatia's national and international attractiveness. Earlier this year, OMX signed a similar deal with the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchanges (CASE) to offer IT services to the financial markets in Egypt, other parts of Africa, and the Middle East (DWT, Jan. 30). Paris-based front-to-back-office software provider GL Trade is adding ASP hosting connectivity to OMX-linked Nordic and Baltic Exchanges. The exchanges that are part of this new connectivity offer are in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Reykjavik, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn and Vilnius. Brokers and dealers will have the opportunity to trade directly on these exchanges. The connection will depend on the brokers' membership to the exchange. They can use either the Internet, virtual private network (VPN) connections or the GL Net order routing network from GL Trade.

Technology vendor RCP Consultants is releasing the latest version of its conversational analysis and deal matching system, RCP Deal Web. The latest version, 4.5, uses more accurate phrase recognition technology to analyze unconfirmed Reuters Dealing conversations. The enhancements, which include the identification of more dealing styles, were developed in conjunction with an undisclosed major bank, says Graham Richards, managing director at RCP in London. The system then pre-sorts the conversation by probability of containing a trade, with the most probable candidates at the top of the list. This pre-sorting of trades reduces the time taken to identify and deal with the missed trade, according to the vendor.