Many global service providers have recognized the specific needs of the financial services community for high-speed, low-latency, and always-available connections for making lightning-fast trades. Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced a service that tries to go one step further by offering a managed service that creates a single interface into a financial services ecosystem and seamlessly connects partners with that ecosystem quickly and securely.

The Verizon Financial Services Network is available to financial services companies in the US and in Europe, where it was announced earlier today. It creates a new purpose-built business infrastructure, using two mirrored networks for redundancy, that connects traders, exchanges, and information content providers with end-to-end managed services based on service-level agreements that offer 100 percent availability.

"This service has been fully aligned with industry expectations, based not only on technical expertise, but on financial industry business expertise," says Chandan Sharma, global managing director of Verizon Business’s Financial Services practice.

For example, the Verizon Financial Services Network includes respect for financial services industry moratoriums regarding software updates and upgrades and designs its services around data feeds, recognizing that trades are affected by millisecond differences in connections, Sharma notes.

"This ecosystem was built for this industry and this purpose; it is not a general networking solution," he says.

The Verizon approach leverages the company's hosting and collocation capabilities to facilitate low-latency connections globally. The Verizon Financial Services Network has its own dedicated help-desk, second- and third-level support, dedicated service management and life-cycle engineering teams, and even a dedicated test environment, Sharma says.

"We have designed this to have the consistent low-latency that this industry requires."

Financial services institutions can pick from among the market centers, service providers, and exchanges connected to the service for their own connections, and then easily choose from those connected to expand their options.

The financial advantage is also in reduced capital expense, since this is a managed service, according to Sharma. Financial services companies can choose to buy a standard managed service or customized options.

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading