The lifeblood of any financial-market participant is connectivity — to exchanges, to customers, and to each other. But the ability to transmit data from point A to point B is merely a prerequisite for value-added services such as market data and co-location.

Banks, hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and even some exchanges may lack the internal resources to build their own networks from scratch, and the large telco carriers only provide a limited subset of specialized services. This creates a niche for a company like Perseus Telecom, which seeks to bridge the gap between what individual companies need and what the large carriers provide.

“In the world of infrastructure, you can’t do everything everywhere on your own,” Dr. Jock Percy, CEO of Perseus, told Markets Media. “Even if you’re AT&T, the biggest infrastructure technology company on the planet, they still can’t do everything on their own.”

With its hiring of Anthony Gerace, formerly with Savvis (now CenturyLink Technology Solutions) as president of global financial services, Perseus Telecom is consolidating its financial vertical offerings with services such as LiquidPath, High Precision Time and Market Data.

“We started Perseus as a layer zero, layer one infrastructure-only company, and now we’ve rounded out our intelligent infrastructure space,” Percy said.

Expanding the Perseus LiquidPath offering to develop Market Data for more global markets is in direct response to customers, such as leading investment banks, hedge funds and proprietary trading firms, who demand powerful and cost effective trading systems.

“We understand the fin-tech market space better than a telco carrier would,” said Percy. “As a result we can deliver these services. High Precision Time, Market Data, and LiquidPath–none of those services would appeal to a typical infrastructure provider because they see it as too specialized, or too far beyond their current capabilities to deliver a service like that.”

During his 14 years at Savvis, Gerace oversaw revenue, strategy, and go-to-market for the financial vertical, which he will now do at Perseus. “As president of the financial vertical, his responsibilities are everything to do with the customer,” said Percy, “from global market strategy, product definition, to sales, customer satisfaction, and helping build out network engineering to support customer needs globally.”

Featured image via mborchert/Dollar Photo Club