Pico Announces Acquisition Of AlgoSpan Limited As Firm Broadens Its European Expansion

NEW YORK, March 1, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pico, a group of affiliated managed services providers of multi-asset electronic trading technologies, is expanding its presence in Europe with the acquisition of AlgoSpan Limited, a specialist market infrastructure provider. The completion of the acquisition was announced today, and will help accelerate Pico's EMEA infrastructure buildout and solution development and provide clients with faster European availability of Pico managed services, including infrastructure, connectivity and market data.

Pico provides core managed infrastructure and multi-asset market data services to the financial community, in addition to regulatory reporting and consulting services in the United States. Pico has a presence in all of the major financial data centers in North America and offers hosting, direct market connectivity, and real-time and historical data in both raw and normalized formats. Additionally, Pico has been building out its low latency network in Europe. Pico clients benefit from quick time-to-market, high quality service and delivery, and outstanding customer service.

"Pico's recently built, low-latency, resilient European network is aimed to leverage superior network design and industry leading hardware to provide a winning combination for our clients," said Roland Hamann, head of Pico's U.K. office.

AlgoSpan is based in the U.K. and provides end-to-end trading infrastructure and real-time market data services to financial firms operating low latency trading strategies to bring improvements to bottom-line trading performance.

AlgoSpan's trading infrastructure underpins all of its customer solutions, including the delivery of its multicast normalized and raw exchange data. The capabilities of the two technology-driven companies are similar; both are known for managing large scale, reliable, low-latency deployments. The acquisition accelerates Pico's ability to provide market data content in both raw and normalized formats in the region.

Pico plans to integrate AlgoSpan's licensed Radio Feed™ product technology into its market data offering. It is anticipated that clients will benefit from the technology by minimizing time-to-market and development costs, with a simple high performance protocol-based interface.

"We are excited to be joining Pico, who share our entrepreneurial culture and dedication to client service. AlgoSpan clients will benefit from Pico's global product offering and investment in low latency infrastructure," said Kristofer Peterson, chief technology officer of AlgoSpan.

"Our biggest differentiator at AlgoSpan has been that we apply our 'shortest path' philosophy to all infrastructure – taking the most direct dedicated fibre routes and combining those with the latest generation equipment and network management that eliminates any 'invisible' sources of latency," said Dr. Rami Habib, director and co-founder of AlgoSpan and chief executive officer of AlgoEngineering Europe Limited, a technology firm specializing in proprietary low latency systematic trading. "Combined with Pico's new state-of-the-art infrastructure buildout and the Radio Feed™ product technology, we believe that our integrated network and market data offering will be well sought after in the region."

"AlgoSpan is a well-respected company in EMEA with long standing roots in the region and a similar company culture of driving results for its clients. We will be fully onboarding key strategic personnel who bring a wealth of experience and local knowledge and we look forward to the combined company offering," said Jarrod Yuster, co-founder and chief executive officer of Pico. "We expect that all of our clients will benefit from the combined Pico and AlgoSpan employee base and product offering. We look forward to supporting AlgoSpan's existing partners, including the low-latency trading business for AlgoEngineering, who will now be able to leverage Pico's broad global offering in their expansion."

In connection with the transaction, Rosenblatt Securities Inc. acted as the exclusive financial adviser to Pico, and NovitasFTCL acted as exclusive financial adviser to the shareholders of AlgoSpan.

About Pico
Pico is a group of affiliated companies that offer premium technology hosting and managed services, specializing in trading technology. Specifically, Pico Quantitative Trading LLC is an agency-only U.S. broker-dealer that specializes in providing services to multi-asset electronic trading clients, and is a member of FINRA and SIPC. Pico Global Ltd., a private limited company registered in England and Wales, under company number 09365923, with a registered office at Paternoster House, 65 St. Paul's Churchyard, London, England, EC4M 8AB, is Pico's U.K.-based affiliate. To learn more, visit: picotrading.com.

CONTACT:
Kate Dockstader, +1.646.362.4365, [email protected] 
Roland Hamann, +44. (0) 20.37.53.5421, [email protected]

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SOURCE Pico

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