From Bob Moitoso, Senior Vice President, NYSE Technologies:

Good afternoon,everyone:

This week, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel entitled “Finding a Single Solution for Global Connectivity” at the TradeTech USA event in New York. Steven Pae from Morgan Stanley moderated the panel while my fellow panelists included Mohammad Ayach of OrbiMed Advisors from the buy-side and several other connectivity service providers.

We discussed the latest trends in the Connectivity space. A few to highlight:
• The buy-side continues to gravitate toward more managed connectivity solutions rather than managing it themselves.
• Sell-side firms are focusing much more on costs, actively managing client connectivity, and consolidating infrastructure. As a result of consolidating infrastructure, many firms are looking to outsource their connectivity management.
• There continues to be a high expectation on service quality and aspects like provisioning and reliability help tremendously when things go wrong.

Another important discussion at TradeTech was how you should evaluate your connectivity provider. I found there were six major areas of evaluation:

• Service
• Reliability – it just has to work!
• Strength of the global community
• Expertise - you want a provider that has the expertise to help you navigate FIX
• Provisioning – start trading faster
• Flexibility - not all FIX is equal, you need to be able to optimize!

The bottom line is that your vendor should allow you to focus on your core competency, which is the investment process. At NYSE Technologies, our Marketplace connectivity service helps you do this by providing the white glove client service you expect (fast on-boarding, 24×6 global support), the strength of the large global Marketplace community, plus the reliability, flexible interpretation of FIX, and 15+ years of expertise in the business.

We’ll be talking about how our connectivity solution and global client community plays an important role in the NYSE Technologies story at the NYSE Euronext Investor Day next Wednesday.

Please feel free to comment on this thought-provoking discussion.