Patrick Lastennet, financial services marketing director at Interxion:
“Capital markets and financial services is a tough environment. Liquidity is scarce. You have to look at the opportunities on a global scale.”

“The trend was about latency and shaving milliseconds and microseconds latency from trades but now it is about the principle of connectivity and the ability to connect to as many venues and cross connect to as many customers as possible.”

“Even though liquidity is scarce, the amount of data that needs to be consumed is still on an upward trend. So essentially in London what we’re seeing is venues reaching out to customers. Exchanges such NASDAQ are establishing operations and

reaching out to the investment community.”

“If you are maintaining a broker crossing network to be future fit you can’t run it on a private shop and you need service provision. We’re moving away from a pure technology arms race to something that is future fit for internationalizing. The kind of conversations we are having is about brokers looking at legacy networks. All traders have point to point. Banks have networks connected to markets plus networks to data providers. They are saying: “This is silly. Why have three when one

will do? Have a hub equidistant from venues and a smaller footprint in the venue.”

THE MARKET

“They (the customers) are out of the worst phase – we are starting to see capital freeing up for rationalization projects. The conversations are holistic and around the network, making use of key access points and making use of exchanges and cross connect. That is mostly on the sell side. On the buy side hedge fund and asset managers are looking to new compliance requirements.”

“Buy side firms are likely to consider outsourcing for software and services but are more sensitive to customer privacy. They won’t put valuable data in a big public cloud. The play is one node in UK, one in central Europe and one in Asia.”

Read more about how colos are addressing the needs of the financial services market:
Interview with Stewart Orrell, Global MD of Equinix Financial Services. 
Interview with Roji Oommen, senior director for financial services solutions, Savvis
Interview with Ian Jack, Global Head of SFTI at NYSE.

See coverage of the financial services industry in FOCUS May/June 2013 digital edition available now.