Tullett & Tokyo

Tullett & Tokyo Liberty develops web-enabled price feed

Tullett & Tokyo Liberty is one of the top three brokers in the global interbank fixed income securities, money and capital markets. An essential market-leading feature of Tulletts broking service in the securities markets is a screen-based system displaying prices at which participants are willing to trade.
In spring 1999, with Millennium compliance deadlines looming, Tulletts elected
Solution summary Situation s Tulletts needed to either replace a nonmillennium compliant Stratus broker price distribution system or spend a substantial amount of money upgrading it. The timescale was crucialthe new system had to be ready in just over six months. Solution s Tulletts required a scaleable mechanism that would fit both into its internal broking operations and with its customers existing dealing room architectures. The solution was to use Microsoft Windows DNA to build a distributed trade capture system employing a combination of Visual Basic and COM (Component Object Model) objects with Windows Internet Explorer for price input. s The resulting price streams were integrated using Microsoft Transaction Server to hold and process the business logic and Microsoft SQL Server as a nonvolatile data repository. These prices were distributed via leased lines to its customers dealing rooms where the trade price data could be displayed, again using COM objects and Internet Explorer.

to replace its legacy price distribution mechanism with a more modern extensible architecture. The new system, built to a tight deadline using the latest industrystandard Microsoft tools and component technologies, affords Tulletts and its clients improved opportunities for the efficient distribution, integration and desktop manipulation of market moving data.

Company Profile
Tullett & Tokyo Liberty plc, formed from the recent merger of Tullett & Tokyo plc and Liberty Brokerage Investment Corporation, employs staff in excess of 2500 worldwide. The international group has an established presence in all the major financial centres. The new firm is a fully diversified inter-dealer broker with leading positions in both fixed income Securities and Global Money and Capital Markets. In addition, the merger brings together two of the leading providers of technology in electronic broking.

Benefits
A modern, extensible architecture was established enabling Tulletts to add data from other growing business areas into its price feed.

The general situation

Financial markets are fast moving. So much so, that traditional software development cycles have struggled to keep upand sometimes have failed completely. In finance, the Year 2000 problem had made this time dimension particularly acutedates are crucial to most financial software and, further, the systems are often interlinked: a failure to deliver the agreed product by one firm can entail substantial liabilities with others. In the period leading up to the year 2000, the pressure had been intense: the 1st January 2000 was not a deadline that could be moved. For many firms, a key decision had been whether to replace a non-year 2000 compliant system or upgrade it. Upgrading involved spending a lot of money for no real business gain whereas replacement carried the risk of failure.

Instead of upgrading, Tulletts decided to replace its Stratus based price feed
Products & services s Microsoft Windows NT Enterprise Server 4.0 s Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0 s Microsoft Message Queue Server s Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 s Microsoft Visual Basic 6 s Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 s Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 s Microsoft Data Access Components 2.1 s Microsoft Exchange 5.5 Third-Party Products Apex True DBGrid Pro 6.0 s Apex Olectra Charts 6.0 s Seagate Crystal Reports 7.0
s

system. The timescale was critical: the project started in April 1999 and the target completion date was November 1999, ahead of the Millennium lockdown where no software changes would be permitted. Patrick Cooper, Tulletts project manager, had analysed the problem and decided that given the timescale, the business objectives could only be met by a pragmatic approach of buying readily available off the shelf components with a single vendor providing the infrastructure. Cooper also wanted to webenable his new system, EqWeb, but not be distracted from the underlying missionto take full advantage of web technology but not necessarily the Web itself as he puts it. In order for off-the-shelf component technology to work, it must operate in an environment that offers a consistent interface, development and execution framework. Microsofts COM technology provided the interface while mature and stable tools such as Visual Basic gave an excellent COM development environment. On the user side of things, Internet Explorer provided an effective and robust COM host. Cooper exploited these natural advantages to the full, extending EqWeb into a distributed environment with DCOM, thus ensuring its scalability for future development stages. While some compromises had to be made to ensure the timely delivery of the systemusing Internet Explorer 4 rather than the more modern version 5 for examplethe payoff from these choices was clear. The complete system was rolled out on time in November 1999. And having used just two core application developers, the system was a win from a cost perspective as well. As for the performance, DCOM is incredibly fast, says Cooper, with sub-second delivery.

The business environment

Currently, two Tulletts business areas provide data into EqWeb. The first is Global Depository Receipts (GDR) with around 100 instrumentstradable securities such as a stocks or bondsand the Cash Equity system with around 8000-9000 instruments. The price feed is distributed out to 45 firms with around 300 users.

The requirement for off the shelf technology created a straightforward system with a lower cost of operation. Patrick Cooper Project Manager Tullett & Tokyo Liberty

In client-server terms, both groups of users are clients of the central system. To avoid confusion, the TTL traders who input prices and deals into the EqWeb system are termed brokers, while the price-feed consumers are known as customers.

The DNA solution

The solution that resulted from the business requirements is based around DCOM, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ). Currently, the two front-end subsystems, one serving the GDR brokers and the other, the Cash Equity traders, provide price data into the EqWeb MTS core. In the smaller GDR system, trades are captured via a True DBGrid Pro component (the official upgrade to the standard DBGrid component in Visual Basic) running in an Internet Explorer 4 container while the Cash Equity traders use a custom Visual Basic application. In either case, the broker can update the price and other trade details with just a few keystrokes. Initially, the price and trade details are routed transparently using DCOM to a component on a central server PC running MTS and MSMQ. This machine contains most of the business rules or logic that check and extract price data from the frontend trade details. Wilson Tapsell, the projects technical architect, made the decision to use MTS for several reasons. First, MTS gives a finer control over the dealing process than is available with simple SQL transaction processing: the business logic involved in a trade can be expressed more easily using MTS and Visual Basic. Secondly, processes using MTS scale well allowing Tulletts to expand its business without redesigning its systems. And thirdly, using MTS at this stage allows for a ready migration to Windows 2000 and COM+. This MTS machine acts a central hub which, in addition to accepting the price updates from the brokers, uses the Microsoft Message Queue Server to route the trades themselves through to further back-office systems for settlement and accounting. Theres an interface to an SQL Server database (again on a separate machine with 1.5 GB of memory, eliminating any possible performance bottleneck) holding data on the instruments together with the price quoted. This database is also used in system initialisation and by the system administrator to add new instruments.

On the customer (rather than the broker) side of things, the user sees prices displayed in tabular form using a True DBGrid control. A customer can configure his or her own pages as required so defining which instruments are to be displayed, with the configuration stored centrally on the SQL Server so that a customer can log on from any location. An Internet Information Server (IIS) handles the HTML page requests from the customers PCs, but the main customer application is a Visual Basic applicationan ActiveX documentrunning the True DBGrid COM object, with the ActiveX document being hosted in Internet Explorer. The applications True DBGrid component connects via IIS to an ADO application running on the MTS machine, extracting price and instrument data as required. Currently, the price data is pulled from the central server with the customers application requesting a refresh at periodic intervals. Having escaped from the Millennium delivery constraints, Cooper intends to move to a push driven technology in the near future so that as a broker changes a price, this change will be visible within two to three seconds to the customer. On the hardware side, again Cooper has used industry standard Cisco routers with leased lines to implement his pragmatic Internet strategy. While at first sight, it may seem surprising that Tulletts didnt use existing ISPs for delivery, Cooper explains "it was cheaper to use leased lines and industry standard routers about half the cost, in fact".

Now and the future

Having successfully built a reliable and scaleable price distribution system using DCOM and Microsoft web-based technology, Tulletts is looking to expand the system by incorporating more instruments and business areas at the broker end. And at the customer end, Tulletts is also looking to use more advanced technologies such as Windows CE and wireless transmission to give customers more flexibility in using the
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end product. Of course, with COM+ and the clustering facilities of Windows 2000, Cooper and Tapsell look forward to enhanced reliability, scalability and performance. Tulletts has used a pragmatic combination of off the shelf software products, communications hardware and standard Microsoft development tools and server technology to build a timely replacement for a legacy system. Not only did the project team achieve the goal of being up and running in time for the end-of-year deadline, it has also created a stable platform for future expansion. As Cooper says, "The requirement for off the shelf technology created a straightforward system with a lower cost of operation".

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