MiFID, the "Markets in Financial Instruments Directive" issued by the European Commission, will bring to E.U. members regulatory rules that will enforce various changes to how brokers and exchanges currently make their business. MiFID is scheduled for the 1^st of November 2007. It asks for more transparency and competition in pre-and post-trade data.

Transparency obligations

• initially only Equities asset class will be impacted even if in the near future also bonds and other asset classes will be affected

• pre & post trade transparency obligations will be mandatory for exchanges and MTFs

• post-trade transparency only is mandatory for all investment firms

• pre-trade transparency is also mandatory for firms that are "Systematic Internalizers"

• all firms cannot use exchanges or MTFs to facilitate publication but must use 3^rd party or proprietary mechanism to distribute information about internalized orders and make them available on possible commercial basis

MiFID impact on market data

• the sources of data will become disaggregated

• firms must publish their execution policy

• and also they will need to inform their customers which “Best Execution” policy is delivered through their choice of execution venues

• volumes of market-data to be internally processed will dramatically increase

MiFID impact on data management

• customer requests will forces firms to acquire and store more customer information

• best execution rules will force firms to either manage or contract for best execution services

• pre and post-trade transparency will oblige systematic internalizers (brokers) to distribute data on internalized products to their buy-side

Industry impact

• High cost of compliance per institution

• Due to these costs small firms will consolidate in bigger firms

• investment firms, thanks to MiFID, will increase annual savings and revenues

• systematic internalization will be a big part of these profits

GATElab for MiFID

suite's peculiar functionalities

traderpath, the quoting and trading engine for systematic internalizers

• posts continuous quotes for equities that they internalize
  

• connects dealers to brokers via VPN or https or FIX, through fixpath, in order to gather liquidity
  

algorithmicpath, the hard real-time event-action manager 

• can implement Best Execution obligations by analyzing fast real time order books to obtain the best execution conditions in accordance with the client’s own order execution policy
  

• discovers and handles liquidity pools for systematic internalization by following custom or canonical trading strategy
  

marketpath, the full access to markets and MTFs, 

• receives and stores large amounts of market data as well as systematic internalizers’ quote and trade data ensuring 5-year history of customer trades and history of all prices quoted
  

• sends quotes, orders and manages RFQs
  

exchangepath, the internal high configurable matching engine,

• supports systematic internalization
  

• builds intra-inter group, order or quote driven multilateral trading facilities (MTFs)
  

dealpath, the post-trade engine, 

• handles post trade transparency obligations
  

• handles transaction reporting obligations