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Title: Seven Brokers Sign On for Tokyo Gateway
Feature: EXCHANGE TECHNOLOGIES
Date: 1 March 2004

TOKYO--Seven Japan-based brokerages have signed up for a gateway to the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM) from French trading systems company GL Trade.

The gateway embrace follows a change in TOCOM’s policy since this past November to permit vendors to provide such services.

TOCOM GL Gateway allows brokers to collect orders from both domestic and overseas buy-side clients to be carried out on TOCOM, Japan’s largest futures market.

"Firms use the system to collect on GL Net, conduct proprietary trading, use our API in conjunction with their Internet trading system, and so on," says Michael Ross, GL Trade business development director in Tokyo.

The basic functions of the TOCOM gateway are the same as the more than 80 other GL gateways that connect to exchanges worldwide, Ross says. "Our gateway basically translates standard GL API calls into exchange-specific APIs," he says. The gateway, which also supports FIX access, is currently supported by a Sun Microsystems Sparc-Solaris platform.

Brokerages in the Japanese capital that have agreed to use the gateway include Iriya Bansei Securities Co., Mitsubishi Corp. futures and Okato Shoji Co.

Officials at Iriya Bansei Securities in Tokyo started using the gateway at the beginning of February, and Iriya Bansei general manager Takashi Sugimoto says that the firm is using the GL Trade offering only for the domestic market. "However, we plan to invest in the overseas market in the near future and this gateway will give us the opportunity to do that," Sugimoto says.

Ross says that TOCOM expects to widen its range of products to offer options on gold futures in May, and that the gateway will be able to support this change. He also says that the gateway will support any other new products the exchange decides to introduce. A TOCOM spokesperson says that while there are no specific plans to launch other new contracts now, "we intend to increase the number of options contracts."

GL Trade also offers market access to other cash and derivatives markets such as the Osaka Stock Exchange (OSE), the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Tokyo International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Tiffe) and the Japanese Securities Dealers Association (JDS) exchange, Jasdaq.

Ross says he expects the addition of TOCOM to play a significant role in the company’s development in Asia-Pacific.

"I believe we [GL Trade’s Asia-Pacific arm] now provide about 10 to 12 percent of GL revenue worldwide," says Ross. "We are still in growth mode in Asia and expect Asian revenues to grow both in actual sales and in percentage of total revenue."

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