In 2014, Moscow Exchange embarked on the main part of its strategic programme to revamp its technical platforms and build a new enterprise information architecture. The initiative is scheduled for completion in 2015-16.

The project included unification of the technology that supports FIX trading connectivity and FAST market information distribution for the ASTS and SPECTRA trading systems. This reduces the effort required to connect to the exchange, as well as support costs for the Exchange and it's clients. Also, the Exchange’s plan to create a new zero client footprint protocol, primarily of interest to high-frequency traders, is well underway, to be delivered in 2015.

Numerous new functional features to our trading and clearing systems in 2014. For example the a service was launched to transfer risk between the FX and Derivatives Markets, effectively introducing cross-margining between these two markets. Multiple changes took place in risk systems, such as an option to set individual risk parameters for concentration limits. On the Equity Market, a market-on-close auction and an intermediate clearing session were added, to name two upgrades. The SPECTRA derivatives platform was updated with a major upgrade to the risk system and change to settlement of futures — which now takes place in the T+2 equity market — and introduction of new option products.

Numerous changes occurred on the infrastructure side: plans for the new Tier III data centre are finalised, and work to transfer the operations has begun. A new toolset to measure latencies and analyse dataflows based Corvil platform has been deployed. A long-term plan and policy guiding the Exchange’s hardware platform is also now in place.

In 2014, Moscow Exchange expanded its global presence and began providing exchange trade network access to customers in major financial centres including London, Chicago, New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo via TMX Atrium’s infrastructure. In cooperation with leading global communications and financial information suppliers such as TMX Atrium, BT Radianz, SFTI, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, the Exchange’s markets became accessible to all investor categories from financial centres worldwide.

A major technological upgrade to the trading and clearing platforms started in 2014 and will continue into 2016: the separation of existing monolithic Trading/Clearing systems into independent modules connected via a fast commercial data bus. This will align the with modern standards, improve the reliability of the systems and open a clear path to future upgrades.

Also in the pipeline for 2015 are two major additions to the overall information architecture. First, a common data layer will be introduced, the Data Warehouse, a set of well-defined ETL processes, and common static data source, known as Master Data Management. Technologically, this area will use state-of-the-art vendor technologies to speed up the storage and retrieval of vast amounts of data accumulates by a factor of 40 compared to current technologies.

Secondly, the Exchange introduced a first set of applications built on a modern enterprise integration platform, dubbed EIF (Exchange Integration Fabric). The platform is comprised of a Data Grid, a Calculation Grid, and in 2015, an Enterprise Service Bus. Together, this layer of enterprise technology architecture creates a common near-real-time information, analytical and transactional platform covering all markets and divisions, including NCC and NSD. EIF architecture, the Exchange will be positioned to quickly build business applications and services that span all markets, and offload slower processing tasks from low-latency market technology platforms.