Corvil » Company

About Us

Corvil is a provider of unified application and network latency management systems to the world’s leading trading organizations including global banks, exchanges, electronic market makers and services providers to the Financial Markets. Reference customers include Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Thomson Reuters, Savvis, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, NYSE Euronext, London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse. The company was founded in 2000 and operates from New York, Singapore, London and Dublin.

Why Latency Management?

In the world of modern trading, latency has emerged as a key factor in determining the level of success a particular automated trading or market making strategy achieves. This has resulted in an unprecedented level of investment into low-latency technologies and infrastructure by the world’s leading exchanges, banks, electronic market makers and service providers to financial markets. All are seeking to achieve a relative speed advantage over their competitors.

However the landscape of high performance trading is changing rapidly. Competition has intensified. Cost and complexity continue to escalate while latency advantage is being eroded. The potential for future regulation in the sector fuels uncertainty. This forces people to consider more carefully their decisions about strategy, tactics, and levels of investment necessary to succeed in modern trading:

• Which markets should I trade?
• Do I need to co-locate?
• Should I take direct feeds?
• Which service providers should I use?
• How will I verify the latency?
• How much will it all cost?

These are just a sample of the questions that need to be addressed. To answer these questions, one needs access to high quality information about speed. It is our view that soon, “information about speed will become more valuable than speed itself”. Why do we say that? It is very unlikely that you are going to be the fastest to every market you wish to trade, all of the time. However, it is more reasonable to expect that you could be the fastest to some of the markets some of the time. Therefore it is critical to understand when you are likely to be fast and when you are likely to be slow across all paths of your trading network. If you know this, then you can decide where and when you should trade and increase the overall probability of achieving the desired fill. It is also critical to understand the underlying performance parameters associated with the trading services you are using, e.g. market data and Direct Market Access (DMA). The right information about these services can enable you to more optimally consume them such that the probability of being fast more of the time is improved. Therefore, those with access to this level of latency information combined with an ability to use that information can gain a competitive advantage. This drives the requirement for Latency Management Systems that provide:

• LATENCY COMPLIANCE MONITORING AND REPORTING – provides continuous real-time monitoring of the latency performance of trading infrastructure and services. Automatically alarms users when required latency service levels are violated. Publishes reports, which can be used to demonstrate latency compliance to clients.
• LATENCY TROUBLESHOOTING – provides forensics and automated workflows for rapid troubleshooting and fix of latency issues at both the application and network layers.
• LATENCY ANALYTICS – comprehensive and relevant latency analytics and statistics that are critical to understanding how your trading applications and network are performing and what you need to do to optimize performance.

This is the background to the motivation for why one should consider a Latency Management System from Corvil.

What Problems Does Corvil Address For High-Performance Trading Organizations?

Customers use Corvil to measure, troubleshoot and report on the latency performance of their trading applications, networks and services. In addition, Corvil is used to demonstrate latency compliance of low-latency services to clients and prospects on a pre- and post-sale basis.

Specific problems and goals addressed include:

• How to proactively monitor and demonstrate to business stakeholders and/or clients that it is achieving high-speed order execution and low-latency delivery of market data
• How to quickly troubleshoot and respond to latency problems associated with order execution and market data delivery
• How to confidently identify where latency bottlenecks exist and target application and network upgrades to maximize latency improvements
• How to independently validate latency performance claims for new low-latency products and services