Regulations and high-speed trading fuel demand for new products.

Exchanges in the Asia Pacific region are expanding their offerings of data feeds as they look to convert assets into revenue-generating products.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd. (HKEx) is launching Orion Market Data Platform to deliver market data for all securities and derivatives traded by HKEx in a common message format.

The platform, which will be capable of distributing more than 100,000 messages per second at microsecond latency, will be rolled out for HKEx’s securities markets towards the end of the second quarter of 2013, with a remote distribution hub in Mainland China and integration with HKEx’s derivatives markets to follow.

Orion Market Data Platform will provide a suite of market data product feeds with content, market depth and bandwidth requirements tailored to suit the needs of different types of customers.

HKEx has selected NYSE Technologies’ Exchange Data Publisher (XDP) to drive the HKEx Orion Market Data Platform. XDP is an ultra-low latency solution designed to collect, integrate and disseminate real-time market data to local customers and, using regional hubs, to customers around the globe.

“Like many financial institutions, exchanges are under pressure to find new ways to add value to their services and provide support for ever more demanding market participants,” Nick Thornton, global head of market solutions at NYSE Technologies, told Markets Media.

XDP gives exchanges the opportunity to better control the packaging of their data and to offer this to participants directly as an alternative to, or in parallel with, traditional market data vendors, he said.

“XDP provides very fine-grain control of how the data is packaged and transmitted to market participants so that the maximum use can be made of the bandwidth available,” said Thornton. “As exchanges seek to market their data to a global client base, this bandwidth efficiency becomes ever more important.”

“The fewer steps needed between the exchange, as the source of market data, and the broker or trader, as the user of market data, the faster and more efficient price discovery and order submission can become,” said Thornton. “Today’s high frequency and algorithmic trading systems depend on low latency market data to keep their pricing models and order books accurate and to comply with their regulatory and compliance obligations.”

The emergence of centralized venues for trading over-the-counter swaps has heightened demand for market data needs to price exotic instruments.

One such initiative is from Cleartrade Exchange (CLTX), an electronic global marketplace for OTC commodity derivatives that is regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). CLTX has launched Cleartrade Market Data Service (CMDS), which provides a combination of OTC swaps-related market data to be distributed by major data vendors to banks, trading organizations, broker firms and analysts.

“The quote vendor feed is an element of proving best execution and price transparency, and offering access to all transactions on our marketplace,” Bob Antell, director of business development at CLTX, told Markets Media.

“Cleartrade provides a specialized order management and processing platform, developed for the freight and commodity derivatives markets.