Who Says FX Needs To Be Reinvented?

A new foreign-exchange (FX) trading platform has launched designed to accommodate the issues and needs of automated trading desks while closely tying with requirements of their financial exchanges, according to the system’s creator, Lucera Financial Infrastructures.

“The responsibility of the financial exchange is to provide the safe and efficient transfer of capital, but this responsibility has become an enormous challenge in the face of fluctuating marketplaces and ever-changing protocols,” the company noted in a recent blog post highlighting the launch of LumeFX.

LumeFX runs on Lucera’s cloud platform and software-defined network. The purpose-built system provides the kinds of tools and services that facilitate safer and faster trading environments, while the underlying infrastructure simultaneously offers cost-savings and flexibility, the company said.

“The Lucera cloud was built to facilitate that need, with each and every layer of the hardware and software stack custom built and finely tuned for the lowest possible latency, the highest possible performance, and the easiest (and quickest) possible deployment, “the blog post reads. The system crosses over three major global markets and runs across 17,000 miles of divergent private fiber cables across the Atlantic, “creating the fastest possible connection between Europe and Chicago,” the company said.

LumeFX is an automated private-trading platform that uses a distributed matching engine. Lucera built the system to directly address liquidity fragmentation and management issues found in the foreign-exchange spot market using an adaptive smart order router to analyze trade order holding time and fill rates. In doing so, the system can help identify unexecuted trades and actionable firm liquidity to facilitate high-quality, efficient executions, the blog post notes.

“By eliminating a central matching server, financial exchanges can remain balanced and continue to operate even in the heat of exploding message rates, system failures, and continual growth,” the company said.

Through a private Web-based management portal, exchange operators can observe immediate and historic market data, see a market summary, trace order history, grab detailed trade analytics, configure the smart order router, and interrupt connections of participants in failure mode, according to the blog post. Lucera’s infrastructure simultaneously provides a foundation for management of marketplace compute and networking needs and allows for unlimited scaling so unfettered growth can be truly experienced.