19 October 2009 News

 

Nomura live on Caplin Xaqua

Nomura has gone live on Caplin System's new Xaqua platform. Xaqua is a single dealer platform built on a core infrastructure designed for financial services applications.

As an online trading platform it is designed to enable a bank to provide institutional end-users with a fully-branded, customised single-dealer portal that supports trading in a standard browser.

Nomura has deployed it to launch its FX trading workstation - following the acquisition of Lehman Brothers' operations in Asia and its investment banking and equities businesses in EMEA.

Paul Caplin, chief executive of Caplin Systems, commented: "Building a similar system has recently taken a major US bank 2 years, with a programming team of up to 70 people. Comparatively it took Nomura 3 ½ months from start to go live with a relatively small team. People sometimes think they will have more freedom in expanding a system's functions if they have built it themselves, however Xaqua doesn't restrict what you can build at all. We haven't yet come across any dataflow or trade model it can't handle."

"The other advantage is that it's quick to roll out new products and workflows, which is the advantage of single dealer platforms. I often hear banks complain about other systems, Bloomberg for example, on which it can take 9 months or more to get a new trading workflow implemented. On Caplin Xaqua you're talking about a couple of weeks on average."

Abid Zaidi, Nomura's global head of fixed income e-commerce, added, "Caplin Xaqua has enabled us to achieve high performance, low latency trading over the internet. We are now in a position to reach more clients and provide them with a direct and significantly more sophisticated trading experience. Additionally, the platform's design means that it can be easily extended to incorporate new asset classes or portals - this flexibility is much needed in today's rapidly changing trading environment."

 Caplin Xaqua is a cross-product single-dealer platform that provides an ‘anti-corruption layer' implemented using abstract financial objects. This layer normalises all trading, pricing and permissioning data and allows the browser client to be de-coupled from the bank's providing systems, while still being built on their models and workflows.