Fidessa Rolls Out DLA Service

The new hosted service will provide users with access to all major U.S. markets, including dark pools of liquidity, says Martin Hakker, executive vice president of marketing for Fidessa.

"We see direct market access (DMA), in certain respects, dead," says Hakker. "It's no longer about access to the market, but intelligently finding the liquidity that's where we come into play with our DLA service," he says.

The new service, which leverages the vendor's smart-routing technology and market connectivity, is fully integrated into the Fidessa trading platform, says Hakker. However, adopting the service may involve a platform upgrade depending on which software version the user has deployed, he adds.

The service is currently available within the U.S., but the vendor expects to release a version for Europe in short order followed by a version for the Asia-Pacific markets.

"We don't have a specific time table," Hakker says, but he estimates that the subsequent offerings will be available in the latter part of this year. "The push is definitely here in the U.S. and we plan to leverage our connectivity globally," he adds.

Currently, Fidessa has one U.S. client in the midst of user-acceptance testing, says Hakker, but declines to name the firm. "They're just testing it themselves prior to going live with it," he says.

The new service rounds out the vendor's high-touch and low-touch offerings, such as its BlueBox algorithmic trading offering, says Hakker.

The vendor first announced the launch of BlueBox, which provides sell-side firms with industry standard benchmarked strategies and a framework for creating their own models, late last year (DWT, Oct. 16, 2006) and earlier this year, New York-based investment banking and trading firm Maxim Group announced that it went live on the platform (DWT, May 17).

Maxim has been a customer of Fidessa's hosted trading platform on its over-the-counter and listed-trading desks since March 2006 and can now provide its customers access to the additional functionality that BlueBox offers. Fidessa officials stated at the time that BlueBox provides straight-through processing and compliance with Regulation NMS in the U.S. and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) in Europe.