BT today announced that it is linking up the world’s five main foreign exchange (FX) locations to help boost the competitiveness of its global financial industry customers.  The company is now offering BT Radianz FX express, dedicated high-speed links between financial hubs in the UK, US, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong involved in almost 77 per cent of the world’s FX trading*.

The new Radianz FX express service offers low-latency and cost-effective, fully managed connectivity that will give traders faster access to market data across the five locations, while making it easier for them to execute trades. In an industry where delays of milliseconds can cost millions of pounds, dollars or yen, this can make significant differences to a firm’s efficiency, profit and growth.

Radianz FX express links directly into the five key third-party global datacentres in the FX trading world.  These datacentres have been selected by BT because they host the IT infrastructure of significant clusters of the FX trading community in each of the locations.

Hubertus von Roenne, vice president, global industry practices, BT, said: “Foreign exchange is the largest asset class by value traded globally. An average of US $5.1 trillion is traded on FX markets every day*.  We’ve created managed BT Radianz FX express routes to boost the competitiveness of our financial services customers.  With dedicated links within and between the world’s five biggest FX trading locations, BT can help FX firms lower costs while creating opportunities for international growth.”

Radianz FX express is the latest addition to the BT Radianz portfolio of services. This is designed and built specifically for the high-speed, high-performance delivery of market data and trading applications.

The portfolio includes the BT Radianz Cloud — the world’s largest secure networked financial community — that offers its members access to thousands of applications and services from more than 400 providers critical to the everyday running of the global financial sector. The Radianz Cloud allows fast, secure, reliable access to foreign exchange applications and services around the world including more than 40 FX trading venues. These venues allow financial services institutions to trade 99 per cent of currency pairs, for example USD/EUR (US dollars to euros), or GBP/JPY (pound sterling to yen).  Furthermore, BT offers managed hosting in more than 20 data centres globally via its BT Radianz Hostingcapabilities.

The investment is part of BT’s ‘Cloud of Clouds’ portfolio strategy aimed at helping large organisations connect easily and securely to the applications and data they need, regardless of where they are hosted.