Traderforce Builds US Team, Mulls Direct Feeds

French data vendor Traderforce plans to bolster its US presence by setting up a sales and support office in New York alongside a local datacenter, and is also looking at sourcing direct datafeeds to support latency-sensitive clients in the region.

By establishing a local presence, the vendor hopes to build on its first US client win, which saw BNP Paribas Private Bank deploy 11 market data terminals in Miami, Florida and Washington, DC.

Traderforce has hired three technical staff at the headquarters of its parent company Flextrade in Great Neck, New York. These staff will be responsible for setting up the datacenter that will house the vendor's technology in a hosting facility provided by BT Global Financial Services.

The new datacenter will go live this month, at which point the vendor will look to build on its local technical infrastructure by appointing a regional manager and a local sales team dedicated to the region, who will move from Traderforce's Paris office. Pierre Laborie, head of marketing at Traderforce, says that within a couple of months, the vendor aims to have about half a dozen dedicated staff working alongside counterparts from FlexTrade to identify new sales opportunities.

Traderforce currently sources all its market data from Interactive Data's PlusFeed consolidated datafeed, and while Laborie says the vendor is "very happy" with the current arrangement, it is considering whether to deploy direct feeds to support the US market, which would help minimize latency for US clients.

The vendor is weighing a number of direct feed options, one of which would be to utilize Interactive Data's DirectPlus architecture. The advantage of this would be that Interactive Data also uses BT to host its technologies, Laborie says, though he adds that the vendor is also evaluating direct feeds from other providers and has not yet reached its decision.