Bank of America Merrill Lynch today unveiled BofAML Express, the firm's next generation ultra low-latency market access and risk control platform for U.S. equities. The platform delivers sub 10-microseconds of wire-to-wire latency and provides an embedded series of risk controls required by recent SEC regulation.
"In this highly competitive environment, having the premiere trading platform is imperative as the market adapts to new regulation," said Michael Lynch, head of Americas execution services. "While we've deployed pre-trade risk checks for some time now, BofAML Express gives our clients an edge by compressing latency to levels unimaginable just a short time ago without compromising any controls. Since its production debut, we've seen rapid client adoption and increasing volumes demonstrating the continued client demand for high performance trading platforms."
The platform, initially developed by Thesys Technologies, currently connects to all major U.S. equity exchanges. Additionally, the parties have entered into a strategic arrangement to leverage the core technology offering for other electronic trading opportunities across asset classes and markets spanning Europe and Asia.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch is a leading global provider of equity, options and futures trading, sales and research services to mutual funds, hedge funds, broker-dealers, pensions, endowments and other institutions. A 2011 Greenwich Associates survey ranked BofA Merrill a top-three U.S. equity electronic trading provider, No. 1 broker for U.S. equity sales quality and among the top three in U.S. equity trading vote share, which measures the banks' relative importance to buy-side institutions. Its award-winning algorithmic trading platform was ranked as one of the top three Pan-European brokerage firms for electronic trading algorithmic quality in the 2011 Thomson Reuters' Extel Pan-European Survey and one of the top three providers of algorithmic trading in The Trade's 2010 Algorithmic Trading Awards.