IPC Continues Asia Growth with KRX Link

Trading telephony and network provider IPC last month expanded its Electronic Connectivity Service data network to the Korea Exchange (KRX), as part of the vendor’s continuing expansion of the ECS network across Asia-Pacific, to meet demand from clients for market data and trading access to the exchange.

The vendor opened a Seoul office in late 2010 to provide implementation, integration and support services to clients in Korea and northeast Asia, and to generate new business in the region, and has now installed 155-megabits-per-second Synchronous Transport Module level-1 (STM-1) links between its Point of Presence in telecoms provider LG Dacom’s Seoul datacenter and KRX’s data and trading infrastructure in the same facility. This enables trading firms to access all of KRX’s markets via ECS, including the Kospi and Kosdaq equity markets, as well as its derivatives market for trading futures and options on constituents of the Kospi 200 index, says Ganesh Iyer, senior manager of product marketing at IPC.

From there, IPC has also connected the Seoul facility to its PoPs in Singapore and Hong Kong, reflecting that the vendor is seeing most demand for access to KRX from derivatives traders in Singapore and Hong Kong, as KRX has become a major hub for derivatives in the Asia-Pacific region, Iyer says. However, the international links also allow market participants in Korea to access data from other regional exchanges, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, he adds.

Though demand for access to KRX has mostly come from within Asia-Pacific, Iyer says the vendor has also seen growing interest from market participants in Europe and North America, ranging from proprietary trading firms, hedge funds, high-frequency trading firms and mid-tier sell-side firms to market data providers and independent software vendors.