Chi-X Europe is the operator of the largest Pan-European Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) and facilitates trading in more than 900 equities, across 19 indices in 14 European countries. Launched in March 2007 in response to market demand, Chi-X Europe’s highly efficient trading platform helps partners achieve ultra-low execution times as well as cheaper trading, clearing and settlement costs.  

Chi-X Europe was the first MTF to launch in Europe ahead of the much anticipated Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID), which was established by the European Union as a means of fostering competition between Europe’s trading venues.  Chi-X Europe’s alternative trading venue was created a full 18 months ahead of the other alternative MTFs – an advantage which means that it is now ranked within the top five European equity trading venues by value traded.

From its inception, Chi-X Europe has been committed to providing the international trading community with mission critical market data in real time, making speed and low latency paramount to the company’s success.  As Chi-X Europe started to expand its customer base and acquire more trading participants, continuing to maintain the consistently low latency required by its customers became more of a challenge.

Rather than hosting its services in-house, Chi-X Europe decided to explore the benefits of outsourcing to a specialist data centre service provider.  Not only would this offer a more cost effective and reliable solution, it would also provide the company with access to the very latest technologies and specialist expertise. 

The Solution
With market competition fierce, Chi-X Europe required a data center services provider that could provide the colocation space needed to support a growing mass of trading participants. It also needed to provide access to a broad range of high performance networks.  Reducing latency was key – by providing instant access to market data, Chi-X Europe is able to give its trading participants a competitive edge.

As Florian Miciu, chief technology officer at Chi-X Europe, comments:  “Chi-X Europe is committed to providing our participants with the optimal trading environment.  As our business expanded we wanted to ensure that our infrastructure evolved with it.  Outsourcing our platform to a specialist data center services provider was a logical step for Chi-X Europe.” 
Following a full market evaluation of data center providers, Chi-X Europe selected Equinix as its vendor of choice, commencing work in August 2008.  Critical to its decision to choose Equinix was the Equinix Financial eXchange, a global financial ecosystem consisting of financial market firms including buy and sell side firms, market data providers, technology providers as well as execution venues that locate with Equinix data centers to support highly reliable, low latency connectivity for a broad range of market participants.
As Miciu states:  “The solution offered by Equinix successfully meets the needs of Chi-X Europe, with Equinix Financial eXchange also enabling participants to directly connect to an active community of strategic partners. 

“Moreover, outsourcing to Equinix has meant an improvement in our operational efficiency, with the management of power, cooling and security all handled by the provider.” 
Chi-X Europe initially hosted its platform at Equinix’s London Slough data centre (LD4). It has since opened a new Point of Presence (PoP) at Equinix’s Frankfurt data center (FR2), and has also housed a business continuity solution at Equinix’s Park Royal center in London (LD3).

The Benefits
“Outsourcing to Equinix has given us a proven advantage over other MTFs by allowing our participants to directly connect to the platform, thus enabling them to bypass relatively expensive and unreliable network links,” comments Miciu.

“Not only have we achieved our initial aim of improving latency, but outsourcing has also enabled us to expand our customer base, thus further improving our return on investment.”
As Chi-X Europe continues to expand, partnering with a data center provider that can facilitate company growth is essential.  “Equinix’s vision aligns completely with our own.  Its ability to scale its services to meet the needs of our growing customer base is critical to our aggressive growth strategy.”