19th June, 2006
Fidessa® launches multi-asset trading platform

London – FOW Derivatives & Securities World, 19 June 2006 – royalblue (LSE:RYB) today announced that it has extended its equities platform to support exchange-traded derivatives. The first phase will deliver connectivity to Euronext.liffe, EUREX, CBOT and CME. The platform provides robust, super-resilient trading across asset classes along with smart order flow, integrated market data, risk management and connectivity to an extensive network of financial players across a global market.

For the past 18 months, the Fidessa development team, led by Stephen Grob, head of derivatives, has worked to extend the core strengths of the equity platform and ensure that all enhancements support an asset agnostic architecture.

Grob comments: “Unlike other vendors, we made the decision from the outset to extend and build upon our own architecture in order to end up with a truly integrated platform. This will pay real dividends in areas such as smart order routing and algorithmic trading whereby we can go across asset class and across exchange simultaneously."

Fidessa has traditionally specialised in cash equities and has built up a strong reputation for offering a highly resilient and robust platform which is now used by over 85% of global, tier-one equity brokers. Fidessa's move into derivatives is timed to reflect a growing need within both the sell and buy sides for global multi-asset platforms that smaller, single-asset vendors do not have the resources to develop or, more importantly, operate and support.

With these new cross asset capabilities, the Fidessa platform enables its users to reduce trading costs, simplify infrastructure, improve order flow and offer a better range of services to their customers. The single platform approach also simplifies regulatory compliance with directives such as MiFID and Reg NMS, by reducing the number of disparate systems and data feeds that are impacted and making the demonstration of best execution easier, especially for structured products across asset classes.

Paul MacGregor, director of technology partnerships, Euronext.liffe, comments: “This move by Fidessa will help bring the cash and derivatives markets much closer together. We believe this will open up new distributions channels for us and will consequently attract new order flow across our markets in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London and Paris.”

Grob adds: “As a more recent entrant into the derivatives space we have had the luxury of being able to take a more considered view on functionality. We then validated this approach with our customers before moving into a full production environment. We have now laid the groundwork for firms to structure their businesses around the needs of their clients free from the technical limitations of individual trading platforms."

Fidessa will also be adding support for US equity options exchanges beginning with ISE and CBOE and will then be addressing energy and other commodity markets.

The Fidessa product suite provides integrated trading, market data and connectivity solutions to over 8500 users at 200 institutions worldwide. Fidessa’s connectivity network provides links to over 600 buy-side institutions, 140 brokers and 67 exchanges globally.

About Euronext.liffe
Euronext.liffe is the derivatives business of Euronext. It is the world's second largest derivatives exchange, measured by the value of the business transacted via the exchange every day. Euronext.liffe has created a single market for derivatives by bringing all its derivatives products together on a single electronic trading platform, LIFFE CONNECT®. The replacement of multiple trading venues with a single market has made cross-border trading easier and cheaper. For more information, please visit www.euronext.com.

Fidessa group is a world-leading supplier of multi-asset trading, portfolio analysis, decision support, investment compliance, market data and global connectivity solutions for both the buy-side and sell-side globally. Available as a simple workstation or as an integrated application suite, the Fidessa and Fidessa LatentZero products are built on the clear vision of providing the richest functionality, coverage and distribution to the financial markets community.

The Fidessa suite is used by 85% of tier-one, global equity brokers providing sophisticated multi-asset trading, market data, order management and execution capabilities to all tiers of the sell-side.

The Fidessa LatentZero suite is used by the world’s largest asset management firms through to smaller specialist managers and hedge funds, and provides comprehensive portfolio analysis, real-time P&L, what-if analysis, investment compliance, order and execution management, and post trade processing tools, across all asset classes, to all tiers of the buy-side.

Fidessa’s global network carries over 130 million messages a month covering DMA, Care and Algorithmic orders, Indications of Interest and FIX Allocations between over 1,800 buy-sides and 310 brokers across 100 markets worldwide.

Head-quartered in London and with offices in New York, Boston, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, Toronto and San Francisco, Fidessa group serves 22,000 users across 600 clients globally. Fidessa group was founded in 1981, has revenues of around US$350m, employs over 1,200 people and has been fully listed (LSE:FDSA) since 1997.

For further information, please contact:

Alastair Turner
Aspectus PR (PR Agency)
+44 (0) 20 7487 8443
alastair@aspectuspr.co.uk

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