Citing four elements to launching an FX algo trading shop, Srivastava said they are: high quality data with the ability to execute in a low-latency trading environment; hosting in the data center; having the models sit close to the market, which happens by virtue of our models sitting inside the FX Inside Alpha System; and having the liquidity to trade on the signals that the models produce. Integral has these components and they are symbiotic, said Srivastava. "Having great liquidity results in great data, and having better predictive models and that in turn, requires you to execute very quickly and be able to access the liquidity in the market and having it all in one place, allows you to do that," he said.

"There is not other solution in the market unless we spent huge time and money and people building it ourselves and have the scale that Integral already has," said Srivastava.

To make this available, Integral opened up its FX Inside EMS for anybody to customize and extend its functionality. What's new is a built-in integrated development environment (IDE) within FX Inside Alpha, which allows a user to customize FX Inside EMS to a degree that wasn't possible before. Clients can write their own algorithms and integrate them with the EMS, and they can extend the functionality, using popular programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic.Net. They compile the results and release their proprietary version of FX Inside to run in Integral's data center, so it has low latency, says Sandhu,

Firms can build widgets, compile the code and run that from the desktop, or they can host it from FX Inside in the company's data center. "Ninety-nine percent of the people are availing themselves the option of keeping it in the data center," said Sandhu.

Even though Concept Capital's algos are hosted in the data center, Srivastava said security is not an issue. "The way the hosting works, we have a dedicated machine in the data center that has our models and it is running the models, the pricing, the liquidity on the FX Grid (Integral's network with access to 40 liquidity providers) so we're not concerned with that," he said.

Sandhu says Integral has well over 240 clients on (FX Grid) network, and has offered the FX Inside Alpha solution to more than half a dozen institutions on an unofficial launch of the service. Now that it's comfortable that the service works well and meets the needs of the market, it has packaged it up and is offering it up more widely. "We handle the network and the liquidity access. We handle the EMS. We hand them a development environment. We give them the market data. We tell them to build their model. You test your model and deploy your model," says Sandhu. If it works, the clients pay Integral based on the amount of trading volume done on the FX Grid network. In addition, there's a hardware fee for hosting in the data center — $475 per month for hosting on the customer's hardware, and $1,475 for the customer to use Integral's hardware, which covers all the network fees, hardware lease and connectivity charges, explained Sandhu.