GL TRADE, based in Paris, will provide service bureau connectivity to the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE). The IPE planned to close its futures and options pits on April 7 to become a fully electronic marketplace. GL TRADE - which was the first global network to offer connectivity to IPE, in 2003 - offers brokers a low-cost option to trade directly on the IPE through the Internet or via the GL NET, the dedicated order routing network operated by GL TRADE. The company also will provide its clients with IPE market data.

SunGard has added The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) U.S. and exchange traded funds (ETF) data to its Fame Time Series Database - a high-volume data platform used by financial institutions worldwide. In a release, SunGard executives said the Fame Database now provides enriched current-day and historical information on ETFs to meet the needs of financial institutions participating in the ETF market. ETFs are index-based investment products that allow investors to buy shares of entire portfolios of stock in a single security.

TransactTools, based in New York, partnered with QuickFIX, a freely accessible, open-source Financial Information Exchange (FIX) engine project. By partnering with QuickFIX, TransactTools aims to promote adoption of FIX among smaller firms. TransactTools, a specialist in monitoring and managing connectivity for electronic trading, will contribute source code, resources and support to QuickFIX. "We believe that the more firms that get started with this technology the better, so we'll do whatever we can to make it easy for them," stated TransactTools CEO Sam Johnson in a release.