Exegy, a provider of market data feed handlers, has expanded the number of currency trading venues it accesses in response to customer demand.

Its added six new feed handlers for six FX bank portals: Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Nomura, and Royal Bank of Scotland. The additions expand Exegy’s portfolio of over 200 market data feed handlers, including feed handlers for leading bank portals and ECN platforms for currency trading, the company said.

“You’ve got asset managers or hedge funds that are connecting to the FX aggregators or ECNs, but they also have peer-to-peer relationships with a number of banks,” David Taylor, chief technology officer at Exegy, told Markets Media. “They’re looking across the marketplace and choosing the best price to roll over diverse portfolios. There’s some arbitrage or alpha seeking strategies going on as well.”

Companies can access not only direct bank connections and FX ECNs, but with the same API and technology, can access all other asset classes.

“Exegy’s customers are the large, tier one, sell-side banks and hedge fund asset managers who can not only leverage the technology for a particular asset class, but across all asset classes and really get a big TCO benefit” Taylor said.

The new feed handlers have already been deployed to Exegy Ticker Plant appliances supporting asset management and hedge fund customers. “As the currency markets continue their electronic evolution, the same incentives and challenges that developed in the equity and options markets are driving market participants to seek out faster, more capable, and more efficient market data platforms,” said Steve Hughes, vice president of sales at Exegy, in a release.

Exegy’s data feed handlers are used by applications at the front end of an electronic trading platform, such as strategy engines, smart order routers that might run an agency business inside a large bank, or tick capture engines that will load historical tick databases.

“Some of that’s used in real time, but a lot of it’s used for back testing,” said Taylor. “Basically, anything that needs real-time market data would use our product, and the great value is that they have a single interface to access all of the market data that they need. That works not only across markets, but also across asset classes.”

The technology in Exegy’s appliances was original developed at Washington University for high-performance network computing. “It was all about the use of re-configurable hardware or field programmable gate arrays, and how to do high-volume, real-time data processing with orders of magnitude higher capacity and speed,” Taylor said.

Early investors and early employees of the company, several of whom had worked at Bridge Information Systems, financial news and data provider that was acquired by Reuters, realized the applicability to financial markets. “We defined a product that would perform the traditional ticker plant functions at the front end of electronic trading platforms,” said Taylor. “Taking in the various feeds, especially direct feeds from public markets or other venues in the marketplace, normalizing that data, caching it, doing some value added computations on top of that data, and then distributing it out to applications that want to consume that data in a normalized format.”

Exegy appliances have been enhanced to automatically respond to operational incidents that may impact data quality. Automated actions include the clearing and refreshing of prices when underlying network connectivity is disrupted.

“We had a customer articulate it in an interesting way recently. He said the two most beautiful words I ever hear from Exegy are ‘Street-wide,’” said Taylor. “In other words, when they call into our operation center, our operators can tell them if an incident they are seeing is isolated to a particular appliance, a particular customer network, a particular data center, or if it’s street-wide and everybody taking that feed is experiencing an issue.”