The Customer: Optiver Europe

Founded in Amsterdam in 1986, Optiver, a global market maker, is one of the fastest growing and most successful proprietary trading firms in Europe. It adds liquidity to international exchanges, takes advantage of relative pricing differences between related securities and narrows the spread to help pension funds, institutions, retail investors and all other market participants, including the investing public. Optiver focuses on understanding and simplifying the relationships among financial products, then creating the most competitive markets for them.

Optiver is active in a range of increasingly sophisticated arbitrage activities and is constantly innovating on behalf of its clients. The transition to electronic trading means the company can avoid a physical presence on the trading floor and instead quote buying and selling prices for options from anywhere in the world.

Despite the large scale of its business, the company assumes comparatively little risk through a superior understanding of the factors influencing securities, derivatives and other prices and an ability to respond swiftly to them. Through immediate hedging of its positions, the company has remained profitable through every global market crisis since 1986.

The speed of transmission for orders represents one of the most critical aspects of Optiver’s success. As a result, the company has invested heavily in IT development and employs one-to-two IT professionals for each trader.

The Challenge: Provide fast implementation, fail-safe operation and secure long-term storage for a complex trading and telephony infrastructure

Optiver Europe uses an IPC voice trading system and a mix of TDM and IP communications, primarily through the Avaya Communication Manager, using DMCC with CTI. It supports 150 channels for its traders and 120 Avaya users. It required a robust, flexible and extensible voice logging solution based on proven technology.

In addition, the company needed to meet a patchwork of external regulations to ensure compliance with varying mandates throughout the continent. For legal protection, customer transactions required verification in a fail-safe manner through secure long-term storage.

The incorporation of multiple locations with central administration of the recording solution was also essential for operational control.

The Solution: ASC Combines MARATHON EVOLUTION with EVOip for Customized Solution

ASC’s solution, based on MARATHON EVOLUTION and EVOip, records all incoming, outgoing and internal calls of Optiver’s IPC Voice Trading platform and its Avaya PBX. Centralized recording and a web-based system facilitates playback and administration. Both traders and Avaya users benefit from powerful features including Last Call Repeat.

EVOipcaptures telephone calls from the network and enables storage, playback and archiving of the entire interaction. It meets strict security standards from the payment card industry (PCI DSS), handles encrypted calls and offers central control for organizations with multiple branches.

MARATHON EVOLUTION, the world’s first Linux-based recorder, preserves all transmissions and customer interactions for four to thousands of channels, with a minimum online storage of 15,000 hours. Calls may be played back over LAN/WAN connections and archived to redundant, removable media such as DVD or AIT.

Optiver’s solution also ensures protection from liability through long-term storage in a central IAS database. All calls are compressed and encrypted to ensure security.

The Result: Ensuring Optiver’s Success

ASC’s many years of experience with financial institutions and interoperability certifications with major PBX vendors, including Avaya, helped Optiver achieve the reliability essential in its field while, at the same time, ensuring maximum operational speed of transactions critical to its success.

The ability to meet government regulations through bulk recording and the fail-safe nature of the solution provides two direct benefits to the company: protection from liability by verifying customer transactions and the avoidance of any downtime by complying completely with government regulations.

"ASC’s solution has met all of our requirements. A sophisticated, fast and fail-safe communications recording system is essential for our company to both meet internal regulations and comply with a number of government mandates. With 150 channels for traders and 120 PBX users, this task can quickly become overwhelming for most vendors. In addition to close integration with our complex infrastructure, including separate trading, TDM and IP telephony, we also needed secure long-term storage to verify and document transactions. ASC’s implementation of MARATHON EVOLUTION and EVOip has passed these requirements with flying colors. We installed their system in 2009 and have avoided any major problems since then."

(Rashid Shah, IT Relationship Manager, Optiver Europe)

"ASC is popular among financial institutions for many of the same reasons Optiver is expressing satisfaction. Only a company with extensive experience -- ASC has provided communications solutions for more than 45 years -- can provide the reliability and sophisticated performance required for trading floors, where huge sums can be lost or won in seconds. In these situations, you don’t want your traders thinking about whether the recording system is working; it needs to become a given, rising to the occasion only when needed."

(Guenther Mueller, Chairman & CEO, ASC telecom AG)

Main points at a glance:

-- Integrating communications recording for trading system, TDM and IP telephony

-- Secure, encrypted storage on central IAS database

-- Bulk recording for compliance and protection from liability

-- Reliable and fast operation for critical financial transactions

-- Web-based solution for central administration or access from anywhere.