HyperFeed Expands Into Europe, Wins First Client

Chicago-based ticker plant vendor HyperFeed Technologies has signed up its first client in Europe, following the opening of its London sales office, officials tell Inside Market Data.

Heetesh Rawal, managing director for the EMEA region, says the client, a London-based hedge fund, will go live in June. He declines to name the client.

HyperFeed's ticker plant will provide the client with low-latency data from OPRA, together with data from the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Nasdaq and other exchanges, Rawal says. The ticker plant is actually hosted by network provider BT Radianz in NewJersey.

Rawal says that the client approached HyperFeed and requested "low latency data, particularly for OPRA, in a black box application." He adds that the firm had been using consolidated datafeeds, "which was getting expensive, and they weren't entirely happy with the performance, so they wanted a dedicated solution."

HyperFeed's partnership with BT Radianz, announced earlier this year, was also a factor (IMD, March 26). According to Rawal, "the strategic partnership with BT Radianz was an added benefit in helping to secure the agreement as [the client is] also a BT Radianz user in New York."

Rawal declines to comment on the pricing structure of the deal with the hedge fund client, but says the deal shows that there are users in Europe that need access to North American markets and need to do high volume number crunching.

In addition, he says HyperFeed's plan to add connectivity to Deutsche Börse and the London Stock Exchange has also helped the vendor in this region.

As a result, he says, "We are now beginning to receive a lot of interest across Europe for our basic ticker plant solution."

He says HyperFeed decided to move into Europe after buying the rights to Telerate's TRS and Activ8 products because "the bulk of the users of that technology reside across Europe. In order to service that base and provide the offering locally, it was important for us to start to establish a presence."

Rawal is the only employee in the London office and receives sales and technical support and installation work from Dutch vendor MarketXS, HyperFeed's distributor in EMEA (IMD, July 4, 2005). But he says HyperFeed will likely hire additional staff as the European business grows.

He says partnerships, including with former Telerate partners, remain an option. "For example, in Europe we are keen to expand on our relationship with BT Radianz as we have done with the hosting center in New Jersey, and we are talking to them about the possibility of expanding that offering out to Europe."

HyperFeed is targeting London, Benelux, Germany and the Netherlands.

In other news, last week HyperFeed announced that the MarketXS datafeed is now available via HMDP, HyperFeed's version of TRS, originally developed by Telerate. This datafeed offers a range of data sources covering all asset classes.