London - Colt, the European information delivery platform, has announced that it will be the first managed services provider to directly connect the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) data centre in Basildon to the financial markets in Frankfurt. Colt's low latency route from Basildon to Frankfurt aims to reduce the time it takes to transfer data between the key trading markets by up to 10%.

The announcement follows the NYSE's decision to open up the Basildon data centre to service providers for the first time. The direct connection aims to remove the latency created by using different services, allowing financial services firms with trade matching engines in the NYSE Basildon data centre to trade faster to all Frankfurt markets. This includes the Deutsche Börse derivatives market, which has recorded over 18 million completed trades so far in 2012, up 24% on last year.

Andy Young, low latency specialist at Colt, said: "While high frequency trading is now the norm in equities and derivatives, the practice is rapidly growing in other asset classes, such as Foreign Exchange and Fixed Income. By opening up the Basildon data centre to other service providers, NYSE has given high speed trading firms choice over how they connect to these markets.

Young continues: "The direct ultra low latency route between Basildon and Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt is just the beginning of the Colt story for these firms. The agreement with the NYSE is part of a significant investment in financial services in 2012 which will see us offering continued best in class latency across the following four key trading routes - London to Zurich, London to Milan, Frankfurt to Zurich and Frankfurt to Milan. This follows the acquisition of vendor of record MarketPrizm last year which provides high speed traders with instant access to important market information such as best available prices and options on stocks."