Ullink, a global provider of electronic trading and connectivity solutions to the financial community, announced today completion of the migration of all customers to the MiFID-ready versions of its market access gateways. In total more than 100 managed and enterprise-deployed customers have successfully upgraded their Ullink market access solutions across 24 European equities and derivatives exchanges over the last 3 months.
The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II, which comes into force on 3 January 2018, has far reaching impacts on the trading infrastructure deployed by market participants. This is particularly true in the area of market connectivity for electronic trading, where new regulations require additional information to be passed with electronic orders and related message flows. As a result, every major European exchange listing MiFID II eligible instruments has undertaken a major upgrade and recertification programme in 2017, requiring all market participants to deploy new, certified market access gateways.
Ullink undertook a massive programme of gateway upgrades, certifications and deployments to ensure readiness for exchange migrations. With most exchange go-lives taking place in November and early December, this required an exceptional allocation of resource to ensure a smooth transition for both managed and enterprise customers. As well as trading gateways, post-trade “drop copy” interfaces were impacted in many cases and also delivered on time.
Commenting on the successful migration, Richard Bentley, Ullink’s Chief Product Officer, said:
Ensuring our customers are ready for MiFID II has been the number one priority for our firm over the last 2 years. We have made very significant investments in upgrading our product portfolio for MiFID compliance, and our market connectivity migration project is a huge part of this. We are delighted that we have been able to deliver this challenging project on time, and affirm our customers’ faith in Ullink as their primary connectivity partner.
Ullink provides more than 100 market access gateways for order routing and trade capture (drop copies) across multiple asset classes. Ullink market access gateways can be enterprise-deployed or hosted as part of a fully-managed connectivity service.