COMPANY » SUCCESS STORIES

Canadian Trading and Quotation System Inc. (CNQ)

Client Profile

Canadian Trading and Quotation Systems, Inc. (CNQ), is a recognized stock exchange in Canada with two market facilities. The first, a listed market focused on the junior market capital space, was launched in July, 2003. Pure Trading, the second facility, is a high-capacity, low-latency trading system designed to provide competitive trade execution services for all Canadian listed stocks. Pure Trading launched the cross-trade printing facility, with continuous option market services, in October 2006.

Challenges Faced

  • Implement a high-capacity, low-latency trading engine
  • Provide support for a variety of trade and connectivity gateways - including a FIX gateway for order entry and order management providers and participating dealers

Pure Trading represents a competitive alternative to existing exchanges, providing a new trading venue for Canadian Exchange-listed securities.

Key to the success of Pure Trading was the completion of third-party testing of the trading gateways and continuous testing of new releases and new functionality of the trading engine. With the launch less than six months away, CNQ needed a solution that would facilitate timely testing and response to issues identified throughout the course of the testing phase.

"We had to, in a relatively short period of time, test the capacity and speed of the trading gateways that we have," says Richard Carleton, CNQ's VP of Corporate Development, "first, on an internal level, and then as we opened the system up for third-party testing with our counterparty vendors and dealers. We looked to Greenline for assistance in identifying and resolving issues that either we've identified internally or that were reported to us from our third-party counterparties."

Success Strategy

CNQ contracted with GFT to provide consulting services for assistance in testing the trading gateways internally before opening them up to the outside world.

Beginning in late April, 2006, GFT consultants traveled to Toronto to work with the CNQ Market Operations Group to assist in developing test scripts, running test routines against the CNQ system, and educating the CNQ team in the use of GFT software products.

GFT consultants worked on site throughout April and May to perform an analysis of the current CNQ test environment and perform any modifications that were needed to begin functional testing. By leveraging VeriFIX software, they developed message definitions, templates, and scenarios to test against the CNQ test environment and created and configured a load testing environment.

In June and July, the GFT team worked with CNQ to continue testing of each new release of the software as well as testing with a number of third parties in North America in order to further identify any issues with the system. "We're aiming for a lockdown of the system at some point in August with a launch goal of October 12," Carleton says.

Results

GFT consultants, working closely with the CNQ Market Operations Group, have enabled the new Pure Trading operation to meet its testing and launch deadlines. "We genuinely could not have made anywhere near the progress that we've made without engaging Greenline services," Carleton says.

"We've been enormously impressed with the knowledge and professionalism of the Greenline consultants," he says. "They've been a tremendous asset to our team here as we've gone through our testing activities. We've found them to be tremendously knowledgeable about the mysteries of the FIX protocol. And they've been able to teach our group a tremendous amount about testing of the system and responding to issues that are identified over the course of the activity."

CNQ has licensed the VeriFIX product and plans to use MagniFIX as a means of troubleshooting and error correction. They are also using CertiFIX for certifying third parties who will be connecting to the Pure Trading platform via the FIX gateway.