Derivatives traders, investors and order handlers have a new product that’s meant to provide a seamless user experience across the buy side and sell side.

Chicago-based Trading Technologies’s MultiBroker brings buy-side market participants something they’d demanded for years: the ability to route orders to multiple liquidity providers on a single screen while preserving performance, consistency, and ultra-low latency, TT executives said.

MultiBroker, whose production release was announced earlier this week following six months of beta testing, has attracted more sell-side entities than expected, according to company executives.

“We start with an end user, whether it is someone using a screen, API (Application Programming Interface) or FIX (Financial Information Exchange), then go to the exchange and back, all through TT network domain,” said Tom Haldes, head of buy-side technology for the firm.

While there are competing systems that connect to multiple brokers, they are “handing off” to entirely separate broker domains where the orders are converted and must cross applications and networks, Haldes noted.

Using Trading Technologies’ end-to-end architecture to eliminate going through a secondary broker network, MultiBroker addresses buy-side demands of sub-millisecond precision, the need for troubleshooting capabilities, and privacy with regards to their intentions and total positions, Haldes said. The ability to pre-select brokers or to change the brokers speedily is woven into the X_Trader screens and APIs, and TT’s managed hosting service TTNET maximizes scalability and performance as a shared, multi-tenant application service provider, the Chicago technology vendor said.

Sell-side firms benefit from the ability to differentiate by way of rates and margins, research, asset classes, regional expertise, trading support and capital introduction, TT’s announcement said.

The buy side is Trading Technologies’ fastest-growing customer segment, according to TT’s global sales executive Tim Geannopulos.  “The entire buy-side customer base will be using MultiBroker, but TT also has significant penetration into the sell side,” he said.

Geannopulos said 10 sell-side firms utilize MultiBroker so far, that number should double by year-end.

“The attitude of the industry is that it’s a new era,” Geannopulos told Markets Media. “The buy side needs multiple broker capabilities; the sell side is saying they want to live in and compete in that world. We have a nice suite of FCM and bank clients going on the offense.”

Trading Technologies’ chief executive Harris Brumfield called MultiBroker “the biggest enhancement ever made to the TT platform” since the 1994 introduction of its flagship X_Trader product.