Project Merchant

The aim of the MERCHANT Project is to demonstrate and assess the capabilities of a new integrated trading business solution for financial trading markets (foreign exchange and contract for difference). This new Multi-Asset Trading Platform (MATP) will provide a unique distributed trading capability in which a master trading system will control and link together any number of slave trading systems. This new deployment architecture and its trading chain (liquidity provider to master broker to broker to client trader) enables new trading business models to be introduced.
This development will provide a first to market opportunity based upon the innovations of the:
a) Creation of new order routing algorithms and protocols to enable optimal combination of multiple price providers for a single trade opportunity;
b) Roll-back and recovery across the distributed trading architecture to ensure that a trade is fully, and only, completed once the end-to-end chain transactions have been confirmed;
c) End-to-end latency management approaches based upon content transcoding and the use of application traffic optimisation techniques.
Prototype demonstrators will be produced and evaluated to confirm the approach and to
ensure that the required performance and security capabilities are achieved. Successful delivery of the novel features will allow:
a) A new set of organisations to become trade brokers and to manage their own set of trading sites and associated user communities;
b) The cost of entry to this market to be considerably reduced;
c) The flexibility of the architecture to conform to any technology constraints introduced by national and international legislative and/or financial regulatory requirements;
b) The end traders to split a trade across multiple liquidity providers to establish the best price/liquidity combination for a traded volume. This optimizes the trading opportunities for both liquidity providers and end user traders.