Boston Stock Exchange Forms Joint Venture to Launch BeX, and more

Boston Stock Exchange to Launch BeX With Four Securities Firms

The Boston Stock Exchange (BSE) is launching a new electronic stock exchange after forming a joint venture with equity partners Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Fidelity Brokerage Company and Lehman Brothers.

These four major global securities firms have partnered with the BSE to create the BSX Group LLC that will own and operate the Boston Equities Exchange (BEX).

“This partnership brings together a unique combination of industry expertise and sophisticated technology that will provide our clients with automated tools and a cost structure that will enable us to meet the needs of retail and institutional investors, while managing financial regulatory risk,” stated Mike Curran, chairman and CEO of the BSE in the release.

BEX will use technology from Atos Euronext Market Solutions and Lava Trading to meet the mandate for low-cost, speed and customizable solutions that can be adapted to work along or in conjunction with client systems, the release said.

In February 2004, the BSE was part of a consortium that launched the all-electronic Boston Options Exchange (BOX). According to the release, BeX represents the next generation of stock trading within the National Market System (NMS), which is being modified with the Securities and Exchange’s passage of Regulation NMS.

W.J. Bonfanti Picks Lava Trading’s ColorPalette as OMS

New York Stock Exchange-based (NYSE) floor brokerage W.J. Bonfanti, Inc. has signed up with Lava Trading’s ColorPalette as its trading and order-management system. The privately held institutional broker-dealer provides floor brokerage and trading services from the NYSE floor to broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, hedge funds, pension plan managers and other financial institutions.

After an extensive search of several OMS providers, W.J. Bonfanti chose Lava’s technology, noting that it’s “superior track record was best suited” to help the firm create a trading platform that would provide customers with superior execution and advanced trading capabilities in equity securities. In addition, the release stated that Lava Trading worked closely with W.J. Bonfanti in constructing a global execution platform to provide market access, order-management and routing capability across multiple markets, while simultaneously limiting access to sensitive customer information and restricting routing in strict adherence with NYSE rules.

Kirk Leaves Southwest Securities for Nexa Technologies

Robert Kirk, the former director of institutional electronic trading at Southwest Securities, Inc., has joined Nexa Technologies as director of enterprise solutions.

Kirk’s responsibilities will be to provide enterprise customers with a range of front, middle and back-office applications as well as tools and infrastructure components to manage real-time financial content across the customer-trading environment in a resilient and scalable manner.

Nexa Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pension Financial Services, a Dallas-based provider of execution, clearing and custody.

Nexa provides a complete line of online brokerage solutions including direct-access trading applications, browser-based trading, back-office order management systems, market data feeds, historical data and FIX (Financial Information Exchange) services. Nexa has over 100,000 active retail and professional users throughout North America and Europe, and manages up to 200,000 transactions per day.