NYSE EURONEXT MOVES EUROPEAN BONDS ONTO NEW PLATFORM

Posted December 11, 2008

PARIS – NYSE Euronext (NYX) this week successfully migrated its European bond products onto its new Universal Trading Platform, representing the first part of the platform’s roll-out.

On December 8, a total of 2,889 fixed-income products were migrated from the Nouveau Système de Cotation (NSC) platform onto the Universal Trading Platform, involving approximately 120 of NYSE Euronext’s European customers.

Having started with the company’s European bond markets in December 2008, the Universal Trading Platform will be rolled out to all of NYSE Euronext’s markets in the US and Europe during 2009. When the rollout is completed, customers will need only one connection through NYSE Euronext’s SFTI global network to access all its cash and derivatives markets in the US and Europe and its new initiatives including NYSE Arca Europe and SmartPool.

“In an increasingly competitive environment, particularly in Europe, the Universal Trading Platform puts us ahead of the competition and not only meets the needs of our customers today, but will also meet their future needs for greater speed and capacity as well as sophisticated functionality,” says Anthony Attia, Executive Director and Head of the Universal Trading Platform Program at NYSE Euronext. “This important first step will facilitate the migration of European cash equities and ETFs onto the Universal Trading Platform, planned for early 2009.”

NYSE Euronext’s Universal Trading Platform is based on its existing best-of-breed systems and incorporates new state-of-the-art technology, providing outstanding value to customers and setting new benchmarks in terms of scalability, capacity, ultra-low latency, new functionalities and resiliency. European cash customers will now see latency reduced from 1.5 milliseconds a roundtrip on NSC to 150-400 microseconds a roundtrip on the Universal Trading Platform, with capacity trebling, from 30,000 orders a second on NSC to 100,000 orders a second on the new platform.

“At the time of the NYSE Euronext merger we committed to introduce one single trading platform for all our markets, to significantly reduce costs and create IT synergies,” says Stanley Young, Co-Global Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext. “Since then, our IT teams on both sides of the Atlantic have been working to a very ambitious timetable on the development of the next-generation platform, which represents a step change in the trading capabilities and efficiency of our markets. The first successful rollout of that platform is a significant achievement in a very short time frame.”