NYSE Liffe, the derivatives business of NYSE Euronext, has signed its first customer from Asia for colocation services out of the company’s recently built data center in Basildon, England.

Securing Hong Kong’s GF Futures as a customer was a major win for Liffe, which established its Hong Kong office only in December 2011. The group’s head of Greater China Business Developmetn Cecelia Zhong said Asia was a strategic priority for Liffe.

“We are reinforcing our commitment to the region, as well as our obligation to support a global trading infrastructure for our European contracts, by providing premier products and services, such as colocation, to our Asian customers,” Zhong said.

For GF Futures, a GF Group subisidiary, the value of having servers at NYSE’s European Liquidity Center is in expanding its business in Europe further. The company has already secured the first client – an unnamed “major player in Asian markets” – that will use the Basildon infrastructure to trade in Europe.

NYSE launched the Basildon data center in 2010. The same year, first stocks started trading at the company’s new US data center in Mahwah, New Jersey, built in tandem with Basildon.