Market access and trading technology provider Vela has expanded its SMDS feed handler coverage to include the IMC electronic liquidity provider (ELP) systematic internaliser (SI).
IMC is the latest ELP systematic internaliser to be onboarded by Vela as it looks to consolidate disparate liquidity across Europe. Vela’s data feed handling service, SMDS, provides users with low-latency access, coverage and support for major asset classes.
“Our fully-hosted and managed ticker plant appliance and agile integration process ensures our mutual clients have access to ultra-low latency and high-performance normalised market data as they require it,” said Ollie Cadman, global head of product management and business operations at Vela.
IMC, which develops technology and algorithms to trade various asset classes on more than 100 venues, added that its ELP SI offers liquidity to counterparties not available on other platforms from natural positions held on its central risk book.
“We are very happy to be working with Vela to connect our fast-growing ELP SI platform to their data feed handling coverage and grow the number of firms having access to our unique ELP SI liquidity,” Bruce Gunn, institutional sales trader for ETF trading at IMC, commented. “In addition to this SI being available in Europe, clients in the U.S. can also leverage the same technology through our single dealer platform.”
Systematic internalisers were first introduced under MiFID, but grew in popularity following the closure of broker crossing networks as part of the revised directive. ELP SIs, operated in Europe by market makers such as Citadel Securities, XTX Markets, Tower Research and Virtu Financial, have also seen an uptick in volumes since the regulation was enforced.
Research earlier this year said that ELP SIs account for around 18% of total addressable SI volume, almost 50% of all SI activity below the large in scale thresholds, and 2.4% of total market volume.