Standard Chartered Bank’s new FX infrastructure

We are very pleased to announce that Standard Chartered Bank has selected Solace for its next generation global foreign exchange trading platform. As one of the world’s leading international banks, FX is central to their banking operations and a key service to businesses and customers alike. Standard Chartered trades in over 100 currencies with FX trading teams on the ground in 39 countries.

The selection came after a detailed evaluation of the various products on the market against their requirements and resulted in extensive testing of multiple products against their requirements. They chose Solace because we were able to show them best-in-class messaging for each messaging requirement:

• for streaming data from FX quote sources to pricing engines and clients
• for guaranteed messaging between systems in each trading center
• and for optimized WAN-based messaging between trading centers

Solace delivers all messaging functions through a single product and API, a single management framework, and a single operational platform. Baking all this functionality into a turnkey hardware appliance makes this formerly distributed, complex functionality easy, high performance and reliable without having to get a PHD in messaging theory and operations.

This is a common theme we hear over and over again from many customers. Messaging products that may be architected to be ok for delivering market data are clumsy and complex when attempting to adapt to guaranteed messaging. Over the WAN or to distribute to other subnets, most messaging products rely on simplistic gateways to connect beyond the high-speed LAN and leave you with a messy (and slow) set of point-to-point connections between locations. For reasonable performance, you need lots of gateways, and you have to manage which applications use which gateways. Operationally it sucks, if you can get it to work at all.

With Solace, we have unified the operation of all types of messaging for IPC, reliable, guaranteed and globally networked WAN configurations that automatically compress and stream messages for maximum efficiency. Customer by customer, we are proving to the market that unifying messaging top to bottom doesn’t have to be rocket science to get reliable and predictable results. We believe our customers should be focused on their business rather than plumbing together parts of a messaging solution.

As part of today’s announcement, Standard Chartered also noted that Solace has been selected as their new standard for high performance messaging. Like other large banks that have chosen Solace as their strategic direction for messaging, they can see the value of consolidating the many types of messaging deployments onto a shared backbone that can partition and secure data for many applications. It reduces the moving parts, which reduces likelihood of failure, simplifies operations and reduces total cost of ownership.

We are very pleased to add Standard Chartered Bank to our public customer list and look forward to a long and successful partnership in helping them continue their market share growth in international banking.