Financial technology providers are extending their footprint both geographically and to new asset classes in order to provide co-location and access to the lowest possible latency for customers.

Activ Financial, a provider of fully managed low-latency market data solutions, is expanding its market data coverage into emerging markets with the addition of over 80 new exchanges in the African, Caribbean, Eastern European, Middle Eastern and South American regions.

The addition of these new markets brings Activ’s global exchange coverage to nearly 200 worldwide, solidifying its position in the delivery of managed consolidated data feeds.

“Activ has significantly expanded its connectivity to dozens of new exchange sources and has a global footprint that approaches the major vendors in this space, combined with more network, operations and development resources to support this footprint,” Scott Hall, managing director at ACTIV Financial, told Markets Media.

With exchanges in emerging markets upgrading systems to compete on a global scale, Activ is able to connect to their feeds and in cases of electronic markets, co-locate ticker plants quickly to provide local access to low-latency and global access to distant market data.

“Activ can deploy very quickly a high speed co-located market data feed for that exchange’s customers, while also using our global managed network to source data from other key centers,” said Hall. “This makes that new exchange site a market data hub for global trading.”

Each of these feeds, which are accessible by Activ’s proprietary high-speed network offering, ActivNet, provides access to locally aggregated raw direct exchange feeds, via ActivFeed Direct, as well as globally aggregated exchange feeds via ActivFeed and ActivNet combined with full co-location.

This decentralized architecture provides best-in-class latency characteristics for both local and international exchanges at any ActivNet data center in addition to the highest degree of resiliency.

“Activ design allows for multiple ticker plants to run in remote locations in a very high reliability service model for our clients,” Hall said.  “In addition, by processing the data locally, without the need for regional hubs such as other vendors, the client’s latency is reduced to the lowest levels.”

The company provides managed low-latency and high-volume market data services to more than 400 customers worldwide. Activ also delivers consolidated, hosted and on-site ticker plant services for exchanges around the globe.

Activ is focused on completing global coverage of equities, futures and options exchange traded products and expanding into OTC instruments.  It now carries two consolidated FX feeds and processes seven direct bank FX desk feeds on the Activ platform for ultra low-latency requirements serving the entire latency spectrum in the same API.