MillenniumIT, a subsidiary of LSE Group, has completed the implementation of its platform at Canada’s Aequitas NEO Exchange, a project that has required a great deal of customization to the base Millennium platform.

“It’s an exciting launch for a number of reasons,” Mack Gill, CEO of MillenniumIT, told Markets Media. “One is the fact that as one of the newest entrants to the Canadian marketplace, Aequitas is going to be quite impactful given their business model. From a Millennium perspective, it’s an exciting engagement because of the speed with which it’s taken place.”

From contract signing to market go live, the implementation has taken place in under twelve months. “When you look at a brand new exchange going live with the whole breadth of solutions and functionality that that entails, that’s a pretty phenomenal story,” Gill said.

He added, “There are a lot of new innovative features that Aequitas is bringing to the market in terms of their business model, a whole range of market structure solutions. That has required a lot of changes to the basic matching and order routing models that we have as part of the base Millennium platform, and it’s been great to work with Aequitas to develop these new features.”

MillenniumIT’s trading platform, smart order routing, market data and surveillance products were all selected for the Aequitas NEO solution.

In addition to a lit and dark order book, Aequitas will offer a hybrid trading book that displays aggregate liquidity by price level at or within the NBBO, but with not individual resting order information disclosed.

“The task we set back in March 2014 was enormous; we wanted to build an exchange of the future that challenges existing trading models and puts investors, companies raising capital and their dealers first,” Jos Schmitt, CEO, Aequitas NEO Exchange, said in a release. “The breadth of [MillenniumIT’s] innovative and highly adaptable products combined with the dedication of our two teams throughout the duration of the build, test and go-live have enabled us to bring our trailblazing exchange model to market very quickly.”

MillenniumIT, whose parent company and largest customer is LSE Group, provides technology that powers a number of exchanges around the world. “What we’ve done is customize the functionality to make it deliver what Aequitas wants to bring to the Canadian market,” Gill said. “They really want to restrict predatory trading strategies. So there are a lot of innovations they’re bringing to the market based on customizing Millennium around new matching logic and order routing solutions. They’re kind of the Canadian equivalent, in some ways, to IEX in the U.S. market which all the Flash Boys discussion has been about.”