BOCI Adopts CEP Platform from Progress

Progress has been working with BOCI since earlier this year, according to John Bates, founder and general manager of Progress Software's Apama division.

The Hong Kong-based bank has already deployed the vendor's offering for its algorithmic trading, Progress officials say. The bank's traders are now able to build their own trading algorithms to automatically trade across multiple exchanges.

In addition, BOCI is using the Progress Apama platform and its own trading platform connectivity to link to the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK) and the Hong Kong Futures Exchange (HKFE). This allows the bank's traders to receive market data concurrently from both bourses and place orders into different sub-markets on these exchanges with low latency, under the control of the trading algorithms.

Using the Progress Apama offering, BOCI traders can execute orders in equities, futures, futures indices, warrants and bonds.

In addition to algorithmic trading, BOCI will deploy the vendor's platform in other areas of the bank, including front-office tasks such as back-testing strategies with market data, reporting the performance of the strategies and applying them to the live market, according to Bates.

BOCI did not have a CEP platform, and rolled out the offering from Progress, after debating building their own, says Bates. The bank will use the platform in the proprietary trading and brokerage businesses, he adds.

Recently, Progress Software released Progress Apama 4.0 (DWT, June 9). The latest version of the CEP platform is meant to reduce end-to-end latency of CEP applications five-fold through the new enhanced communications infrastructure that supports the interactions between components of the Apama application, according to Progress officials. The latest version includes Apama Studio, an integrated development environment that further extends rapid application development. Some of the new features include inline demonstrations and samples, which made Apama's CEP feature more accessible to novice users, officials said at the time.