UK Move

Sept 15, 2009 (LBO) - Sri Lanka's Millennium IT will be acquired by London Stock Exchange and its faster trading software would replace the British bourse's existing platform, a media report said. The report said LSE could pay around 50 million sterling pounds (about 9.4 billion rupees) to buy the technology firm.

Britain's Financial Times newspaper said MillenniumIT's system was claimed to the fastest in the world, handling a trade in 130 microseconds, compared with 250 microseconds for the Nasdaq's OMX system.

The MillenniumIT system can handle up to one million messages per second, compared with 20,000 on the London Stock Exchange's TradElect system and Chi-X Europe's system which processes 225,000 messages per second, the report said.

Mr Rolet told the Financial Times this month that lack of capacity was holding the LSE back.

"We have to [upgrade] because the technology specifications are no longer competitive and that’s impacting our ability to support volume growth," Xavier Rolet, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange as saying.

MilleniumIT, founded by Sri Lankan Tony Weerasinghe developed the Colombo Stock Exchange trading software, making it the mo