When it comes to network latency, nobody cares more than the financial services industry because even the tiniest slowdown in network performance can translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue. That’s why it’s a big deal when a leading stock exchange chooses a service provider for its network.

The London Stock Exchange in June announced that it had approved Yipes Enterprise Services as its first Ethernet service provider. Yipes offers FinancialConnect!, a secure Ethernet-based extranet for electronic trading.

The London Stock Exchange’s 300-plus corporate customers can choose to access its Infolect real-time trading and share pricing information directly through its own IP network or through an approved service provider such as Yipes.

The London Stock Exchange is the world’s third largest stock exchange. Infolect is one of the fastest real-time information delivery systems in the world, with company pricing information delivered within two milliseconds.

"Electronic trading volume is growing rapidly, and providing our member firms with fast access to our platform is critical to our competitive edge. We needed a network service partner with an infrastructure that provides extremely low latency and that is trusted by the financial community," Wendy Morgan, head of real-time data of the London Stock Exchange, said in a statement.

"In addition, we needed a provider with a reach that extends throughout the U.S. and around the world," Morgan added. "Yipes' Extranet service gives us everything we were looking for to maintain our leadership position, and gives our customers the option of choosing a provider that offers the lowest latency available today."

The London Stock Exchange was in discussion with Yipes for a year before signing an agreement with the carrier. Yipes had to prove that it can provide secure, reliable, low-latency communications to the London Stock Exchange, which hasn’t had an outage for seven years.

"We had to make sure they had a very reliable service," Morgan said in an interview. "We had to choose a partner that can achieve our high record of reliability."

The London Stock Exchange previously approved BT Radiant and SAVVIS as service providers for its Infolect market data service.

London Stock Exchange officials hope the deal with Yipes will help them increase sales of Infolect in the United States, where Yipes is an up-and-coming service provider.