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Fidessa's fragmentation index wins plaudits at innovation showcase

Posted: 17 February 2009

Fidessa has won recognition for its fragmentation index as part of the Finextra Innovation Showcase 2009.  The showcase highlights the most innovative technologies, products and projects in financial services over the last 12 months. 

The Fidessa Fragmentation Index (FFI) was launched in November 2008 to provide a tool for both buy-sides and sell-sides to understand the trends in the evolving, post-MiFID European landscape.  The FFI offers an immediate, simple, standard measure of stock/market fragmentation that applies equally across established exchanges and the new alternative venues.  It has been made freely available to the market through an open access web site, allowing the entire trading community to influence and enhance the service.  Through its collaborative nature, the FFI encourages an evolving consensus on the impact of the next wave of post-MiFID changes on the trading community, its trading styles and on the adoption and application of technology.

With MiFID leading to new venues for European equities execution, the impact of fragmentation has been debated in the industry for some time.  "There was no way of tracking how far the debate had turned into reality, and what shape any fragmentation was taking," said Steve Grob, Director of Strategy at Fidessa. "We developed the FFI as a common yardstick to measure how trading of stocks was changing across multiple new venues – and to initiate a conversation among the trading community about the impact of this new, ever-changing environment.”

The Innovation Showcase is designed to highlight some of the most interesting financial technology developments over the past 12 months. It focuses on newness, uniqueness and impact; clever ways of solving a problem; and projects at the leading edge of new industry trends.

“The FFI was a rapid response from Fidessa, using its own existing resources and off-the-shelf technology, to bring transparency to market structures in a state of transition," commented Elton Cane, Strategy Director at Finextra. "As a free service to the industry, it helps cement Fidessa's position as a thought leader in European trading.”

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