It has been a big year for the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

The upgraded TradElect trading platform was launched in June. And there is major integration work to be carried out following the acquisition of the Boursa Italiana this month.

The merger has spawned a programme to migrate all the Boursa’s equities trading onto the London systems by September 2008.

In reverse, UK-based clearing and settlement processes which are currently outsourced will be migrated to Italy, which is widely regarded as the most efficient clearing platform in Europe.

Italian job
There are 10 components to integrating stock exchange IT systems, LSE chief technology officer Robin Paine told Computing.

Work must be done on network conversion, enterprise systems integration, derivatives and bonds integration, corporate data warehouses and web sites.

At LSE, work started three months before the Boursa deal was signed, said Paine.

“Migrating Italian cash equities to TradElect is the most challenging part, particularly in a tight timeframe,” he said.

The next release of the London system, which is due this month, will speed up transaction times and double trading capacity ready for the Italian business.

“The upgrade will enable us to move forward with the integration, improve efficiency and reduce our costs,” said Paine.

LSE built its technology specifically to handle multiple time zones, currencies and asset classes rather than to be applicable only to the London equities market, said Paine.

Open Univista
But LSE’s IT focus is not only on its trading systems.

This year also saw the completion of a wide-ranging technology programme which included new services launched to exchange members.

The Dutch bank ABN Amro is the first client to sign up to LSE’s Univista service, which provides a single web-based portal that collates information from a range of internal sources such as trading platforms and payment systems.

Several firms offer similar services, but only Univista uses the application service provider model, according to Paine.

“Because it is a web-based service as a core architecture, Univista can be deployed very rapidly with a low footprint at our clients’ sites,” he said.

“Data feeds could come from a front office trading system in London, a settlement service in continental Europe or a risk management system in the US.”

Univista reconciles and cleanses the data before providing information and reports about the data quality or conflicts arising.

Staff come up with bright ideas
The London Stock Exchange (LSE) is using an intranet forum to trawl for business ideas among the organisation’s staff.

“We hold a weekly forum, which I chair, but the committee represents the business as a whole,” said LSE chief technology officer Robin Paine.

The most significant proposal so far is to upgrade the programming language used for the main trading platform. The move from .Net 1.1 to .Net 3 will be incorporated in the TradElect release scheduled for early next summer.

Staff suggestions have also led to the organisation’s computers being turned off at night to save energy.