Brokers & market makers wake up to the reality of multi-asset trading delivered on a web browser

ETX Capital deploys Ariel’s multi-asset online trading platform

London, 12 October, 2009: Ariel (www.arielcommunications.co.uk), the experts in Financial Spread Betting, Foreign Exchange and CFD trading software, today announces that ETX Capital (www.etxcapital.co.uk) has migrated its Forex offering to Ariel’s multi-asset platform.

ETX Capital has been using Ariel’s platform for Financial Spread Betting since February 2009, so the addition of Forex to the Ariel platform makes ETX one of the first to deploy a truly multi-asset web- based trading platform. ETX Capital clients can now trade Forex (foreign exchange) and Spread Bet on a single account and plans to offer CFDs on the same Ariel platform later this year.

Ariel’s multi-asset platform has been designed for brokers and market makers to serve both institutional and retail clients. Ariel’s single asset systems and components have found favour with many firms including City Index, Cantor Fitzgerald and ODL Securities, and power well-known white labels including Paddy Power, Tradefair and E*Trade. It is expected that more market participants including new brands entering the market will follow ETX Capital’s example and offer Ariel’s platform in order to increase asset class coverage – driving trading volumes, improving margins, and reducing costs.

Rob Smith, Head of IT at ETX Capital, comments:

“It’s great for us to give our clients the option of being able to trade multiple asset classes from a single customer account – in our case Forex, Financial Spread Betting and later this year CFDs. The advantages are considerable for us and for our clients who ultimately benefit through improved speed of trade execution. These enhancements to our service are central to our customer proposition as it allows us to offer far tighter dealing spreads and improved funding/margin rates. This new feature-rich technology has been very well received by our customers.”

Angus Clacher, CEO of Ariel, comments:

“Ariel’s client list includes top UK brokers and market makers. These financial firms are serving tens of thousands of institutional and retail clients across thousands of markets in multiple asset classes in real time. Our multi-asset trading platform allows these firms to offer more products, more profitably and with better risk control than was previously possible. This is why brokers, market makers and their white label partners choose Ariel to run their business.”

This deployment is a good example of how Ariel is able to deliver its multi-asset online platform in line with a customer’s evolving requirements. This is very much a result of Ariel’s focused and progressive development programme and most recently its adoption of “Scrum” development disciplines. Ariel is one of the growing number of companies that have successfully adopted Scrum (www.scrumalliance.org), an Agile methodology (www.agilealliance.org), which provides an adaptable management framework to drive the development and delivery of Ariel’s platform according to business needs.

Angus Clacher adds:

“We run all of our projects at Ariel using Scrum. This benefits customers – such as ETX – that run very fast-changing businesses. Scrum allows us to collate vast and diverse requirements, prioritise them in terms of business value and deliver new functionality every month. For example, ETX told us they wanted their dealers to be able to drill down to client account details from the live Order Monitor. Using Scrum, our team at Ariel was able to capture this requirement in the Scrum Backlog (effectively a product feature wish list), then on sign off move the requirement into the next Sprint (i.e. the team’s ‘to do’ list) and deliver within 10 days.”

For further information please contact:

Fiona Conroy at ICIS on +44 20 7651 8688

fiona {at} icisnet(.)com

About Ariel Ltd
Ariel Communications is a leading provider of Financial Spread Betting, Forex and CFDs systems to the City of London. Ariel has been providing complete turn key systems, individual components such as price engines and bespoke development since 1995. With one of the largest teams in the industry dedicated to developing financial trading software, Ariel’s experts are at the forefront of product innovation including risk management, price engines and order routing.

www.arielcommunications.co.uk

About ETX Capital
ETX Capital is a fast-growing, dynamic Financial Spread Betting company based in the City of London. It provides a range of investors with unrivalled levels of customer support from friendly, knowledgeable staff, all delivered with the utmost client confidentiality.

ETX Capital is a trading name of Monecor (London) Limited, is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority, FSA registration number 124721, and a Member of the London Stock Exchange.

www.etxcapital.co.uk