Merrill Lynch has chosen Wombat Financial Software to provide the market data infrastructure for the firm’s electronic trading platform.

Though unable to provide specifics of what Merrill is doing with its platform, Wombat’s vice president of business and planning Ken Barnes noted that one of the aspects of Wombat’s technology that most impressed the firm was breadth of choice.

Among the electronic trading trends that have been running through Wall Street in the past two years have been announcements about increased efforts in direct access (such as Citigroup’s acquisition of Lava Trading in July of 2004), algorithmic trading, and pre- and post-trade analytics – all of which Wombat can provide data to support.

“Others out there might offer a few consolidated feed handlers; we have 70 feeds across asset classes,” Barnes said.

The list of feeds on Wombat’s Web site include the leading North American equity and equity derivative exchanges; several ECNs, such as Arca, Bloomberg Tradebook and Brut; a dozen European exchanges including the London Stock Exchange and Euronext; ten planned Asian market feeds; a selection of FX feeds, such as HotSpot and Currenex; fixed income feeds from BrokerTec, TradeWeb and the Municipal Securities Regulatory Board (MSRB); and vendor feeds from Reuters, IDC/Comstock and others.

Wombat supports the Windows software environment and prides itself on being agnostic to data vendors, middleware vendors and third-party technology vendors. The Wombat distributed ticker plant is neutral to whether data is generated internally or comes from direct exchange feeds, aggregated vendor feeds or internal data sources. “Flexible normalization modules” make it easy to convert data streams from one format to another and agnostic messaging and publishing APIs allow clients to subscribe to one API regardless of the underlying platform. In addition the company automates repetitive tasks so that when a change is made in one API, other APIs that the change may affect can be tested and checked automatically. All this gives the company the ability to create new feed handlers very quickly, said Barnes.

Along with the breadth of choice, the flexibility of the architecture and the low-latency were other factors that impressed Merrill Lynch, said Barnes.

In addition, Barnes added, the companies were a nice fit.

“Wombat has come a long way from having built a nice piece of technology to having a sales and support network that can accommodate a global company like Merrill Lynch,” Barnes said.

While most of Wombat’s business is in North America, it is expanding into Europe aided in part by an engineering center located in Belfast, Northern Ireland.