Expanded Verizon Financial Network Boosts Global Trading Capabilities

To help trading firms and other financial institutions access global financial exchanges quickly and more efficiently, Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced the expansion of its Verizon Financial Network to more than 50 new markets, services and data centers in Europe and in North America. Financial services companies will benefit from secure and on-demand access to markets and applications, in addition to increased flexibility and scalability.

The Verizon Financial Network is a dedicated trading infrastructure-as-a-service solution used by many of the world’s largest financial institutions to consolidate market access, distribute markets and services and collaborate with clients and partners, and execute pre-trade, trade and post-trade transactions within a secure, resilient and low-latency environment.

"Companies in today’s capital markets industry face a multitude of challenges – ranging from market structure complexity and friction, to how to deliver innovation quickly and consistently in a global marketplace," said Chandan Sharma, global managing director of financial services at Verizon Enterprise Solutions. "This is driving the need for more flexible and scalable ways to access markets as well as distribute applications and services seamlessly without sacrificing performance."

"With our next-generation release of the Verizon Financial Network, we’ve greatly expanded its utility to deliver a fully managed solution that provides market participants with on-demand and high performance access to the world’s leading and most diverse trading marketplaces," Sharma said.

The Verizon Financial Network now allows trading firms to access more than 75 markets, applications and industry data centers, and to seamlessly connect their trading applications co-located with various financial exchanges. The newly expanded solution also enables exchanges, service providers and financial technology companies to tap into a global ecosystem comprised of hundreds of firms and data centers to deliver their markets, applications and services to the capital markets community – throughout key markets including London, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, New York and Chicago.

"Verizon is essentially taking the financial extranet look and feel and making it relevant in today’s data center-focused trading landscape," said Rik Turner, senior analyst at Ovum. "Market instability, volatility and the difficulty in guaranteeing returns on investment have all led firms to seek alpha in new venues, geographies and asset classes. This in turn has generated a need to set up and tear down low-latency connectivity on the fly, as firms try out new trading strategies and cast around for new ways of achieving a profit. A modern financial extranet such as the Verizon Financial Network that connects to multiple venues and enables multi-asset trading across different geographies can help them explore these new avenues."

For more insight on the key challenges facing financial institutions today, watch the video below.