Nasdaq is expanding its digital footprint by establishing a Nasdaq Point of Presence (Nasdaq POP) in Chicago that will provide a direct route to Nasdaq’s main data center in Carteret, N.J.

The Nasdaq POP in Chicago, along with the Nasdaq POP already live in Secaucus, will be available for market participants seeking access to Nasdaq eSpeed, the exchange group’s over-the-counter platform for electronic trading in U.S. Treasury securities, and Nasdaq’s U.S. cash equities and equity derivatives markets, the company said in a release.

“We’re just trying to simplify the process,” Stacie Swanstrom, head of global access services and senior vice president of global trading and market services at Nasdaq, told Markets Media. “You could go through extranets, but really what we do is we take care of all of it for you, and we also have a very fast route. It’s 7.3 milliseconds to get to Chicago and 150 microseconds to get to Secaucus.”

Nasdaq’s Global Access Services group provides risk, compliance and reporting platforms in addition to connectivity. “We’ll manage the failover for them, where their staff doesn’t have to do that,” said Swanstrom. “Typically with other types of connectivity, your own staff would have to be monitoring and managing that, and we will do that for them.”

Housed in Equinix’s Chicago data center (CH4), Nasdaq’s POP will provide clients with trading systems already located in the Midwest region the ability to cross connect directly to Nasdaq markets.

“Essentially what we’re doing is expanding our points of presence,” Swanstrom said. “In September we launched our Secaucus POP, connecting our Carteret data center with Secaucus. So, through any of these POPs, it really allows firms to more easily get to Carteret and to be able to access our market as well as receive data feeds, whether they’re Nasdaq or third-party data feeds.”

Nasdaq will establish a disaster recovery facility in the Chicago POP for Nasdaq eSpeed, and plans to quickly expand the number of services offered there.

“It sets us up nicely to expand other services in Chicago,” Swanstrom said. “What we’re trying to do is make it easy for them to connect with us, do business with us, get data from us but also to save costs in the process.”

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