SunGard Debuts Consolidated Global Network

After two years of work, trading software and services provider SunGard has completed the consolidation of three networks—SunGard Transaction Network (STN), BNet and GL Net—which form the new SunGard Global Network, vendor officials announced today.

The growing appetite of clients to trade new asset classes in new geographies was the impetus for the move, says Philippe Carré, global head of connectivity at SunGard. "Our US clients will now have access to European markets, but also to emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, as well as significant connectivity to Asian markets such as China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, which until now were out of reach for users of SunGard Transaction Network and BNet," he says, adding that services for equity, fixed-income securities, listed derivatives, mutual funds, money market funds and other cash equivalents will be offered in the future.

According to Carré, clients will be able to leverage their existing network connections to access the new services without time-consuming and expensive changes to their infrastructure. "Someone in the US accessing US equities via SunGard will now be able to use the same technical framework to reach brokers in Asia, Europe and Latin America," he explains.

The new network will connect more than 1,600 buy-side firms to more than 500 brokers and 110 markets across the globe, say vendor officials. "We are pulling all the different services from all the different networks together and making them available for a much wider community," says Carré. "We have doubled the number of brokers connected to the network pretty much overnight, and we will be able to leverage the huge buy-side community that SunGard has in the US to connect those clients to international markets."

SunGard began work on consolidating the three networks when it acquired its global competitor  GL Trade in 2008. "Getting the networks to interact was a lot of work, but we wanted the transition to be seamless, and completely transparent to the client, so they didn't have to make any changes themselves," says Carré. "Now it's just a question of talking to existing clients and letting them know about these new opportunities. The sum of the networks is greater than their constituent parts. In this case, one plus one plus one equals five," he adds.