The growing importance of Latin America as a financial market is spawning a wave of trading technology development for fulfilling the demands of global firms requiring high performance access to LatAm markets.

Americas Trading Group (ATG) has launched a broker-neutral, high-performance execution platform combining ATG’s expertise in electronic trading with NYSE Technologies’ Managed Transaction Hub infrastructure.

The platform manages local and cross border order flow to the different exchanges and brokers in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Argentina. Clients in those markets can also route orders to the various destinations around the world reached by NYSE Technologies’ SFTI global network for the financial industry.

The key problem addressed by the platform is the scalability of the electronic trading infrastructure in Latin America.

“By creating a broker neutral executing platform that connects the buy-side and the sell-side to all of their trading counterparts and to the main regional exchanges, ATG allows participants to use electronic trading as a service, outsourcing their infrastructure while maintain all of their core business lines,” Francisco Valente, head of electronic trading at ATG, told Markets Media. “Buysides gain from the possibility of selecting any number of local brokers, while sellsides gain from substantially reducing their investments in infrastructure while being able to reach out to a much larger universe of global clients.”

Driving demand for cross-border trading in Latin America are economic growth, increased value of commodities, technology improvements in exchange infrastructure, increased regulatory and market structure improvements.

“As a global scale, Latam is one region in which portfolio managers are looking with increased focus to generate extra returns to their current strategies,” said Valente. “As one or other local Latam markets faces macroeconomic challenges, liquidity will automatically flow across the region – but not out of it, as it is more and more seen as a cohesive financial region.”

The concept is to provide a comprehensive suite of products and services designed to fulfill the needs of the most demanding and sophisticated global clients requiring high performance access to Latin America’s markets.

ATG provides access to a portfolio of high performance and low latency execution services, ranging from global market connectivity to locally developed algorithms, market data, trading screens, monitoring tools, latency and availability reports. In addition, ATG offers managed solutions, expert consultancy and hosting services in its co-location facilities. ATG sees this initiative with NYSE Technologies as a ground-breaking opportunity to reach a community of investors never explored before, allowing for local players to increase their access to international markets.

“The system provides market participants around the world with a single point of access to all major markets in Latam,” said Valente. “Clients in those markets can also route orders to the destinations available on NYSE Technologies’ SFTI network.”