NPL, the UK’s National Measurement Institute, is expanding its precise timing service, NPLTime®, through a distribution agreement with QuantHouse, the independent provider of trading and infrastructure solutions and innovative market data services to the quant trading community.

NPLTime® provides a precise time signal delivered over fibre, traceable to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), accurate to within 1 microsecond. The agreement will provide QuantHouse customers with the capability for traceable timestamping, latency monitoring and synchronisation. Furthermore, it enables users to be fully compliant with MiFID II timestamping requirements and eliminate their reliance on GPS, removing susceptibility to jamming, spoofing, urban canyon effects and space weather.

The adoption of automated trading throughout the industry has increased the need for synchronisation of trading systems and traceability to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The agreement comes ahead of the implementation of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) update to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), which will require financial organisations to achieve up to 100 microsecond level traceability of trading events by January 2018.

Through timestamping, QuantHouse clients will now be able to evidence the exact moment a trade was executed, providing a clear audit trail for both internal analysis and regulatory reporting. Accurate time stamping of trades is crucial in a fragmented trading environment as it supports activities such as TCA (transaction cost analysis) necessary to improve execution performance, MiFID II compliance towards best execution and market surveillance, all reliant upon an accurate timeline of events to carry out further analytics.

NPL is the home of atomic time, and operates one of the world’s most accurate atomic clocks, NPL CsF2, which is accurate to one second every 158 million years. NPLTime® is an extension of many decades of time dissemination expertise, giving industry direct access to reliable timing straight from the source.

Leon Lobo, strategic business development manager, NPL, says: “In today’s markets, timing is everything; precise timing offers competitive advantage and ensures regulatory compliance. The magnitude of the new rules must not be underestimated. MiFID II will make having a highly accurate time standard all the more important, to ensure that transactions completed in microseconds are easily certified.

At NPL, the home of the UK’s National Timescale, we provide the only precise time dissemination solution that is directly and physically connected to UTC, and as such is not susceptible to jamming, spoofing, urban canyon effects and space weather. This agreement with QuantHouse, which has a leading position in providing advanced trading solutions, further expands our network, to meet the ever increasing demand for precise timing ahead of MiFID II implementation in January.”

Stephane Leroy, QuantHouse Chief Revenue Officer and Business founder concluded: “Adding timing services powered by NPLTime® to our QuantLINK infrastructure product line provides our community of clients, on the buy-side, sell-side and exchanges, with a cost effective service which enables them to comply with regulatory obligations. Combined with our QuantFEED service, clients can also have the possibility to get UTC time synchronisation throughout the entire chain from market data to order flow for ultimate time accuracy.”

Source: NPL