BUSINESS
Wombat to create new jobs in Belfast
07-06-2007
by Charlie Taylor
A US financial software firm has announced it is to create 77 new jobs in Belfast as part of a STG2 million investment.
The global financial services company, Wombat Financial Software, which established a centre for enginering excellence in Belfast in 2005 with STG377,500 in funding from Invest NI, develops software used to supply stock exchange data to financial institutions at high speed. This data is then used to make trading decisions, many of which rely on high-speed connectivity.
Wombat's distributed architecture underpins automated market-making systems, electronic-trading floors and tick-capture platforms around the world, exploiting direct-data feeds from OPRA, ECNs, Nasdaq and CTA with volumes exceeding 300 million records per day.
The company's product suite includes low-latency feed handlers for direct and aggregated feeds; ticker plants delivering data with less than 1 millisecond latency; high-performance market data APIs; middleware components; virtual order books and option chains; tickcapture adapters; and signal servers.
"Wombat's decision to reinvest here underlines the firm's confidence in Northern Ireland and the specialist skills which are available here. It also further strengthens the local financial services sector, a key target area for growth and investment," said economy minister Nigel Dodds.
"Clearly the company's initial decision to open an operation in Belfast has added value to Wombat's global business and I hope that this further expansion will continue to deliver major successes in new and existing markets," he added.
The proposed expansion will see the firm's workforce increase threefold with new positions arising in software development, service operations and sales and marketing.
"Our experience in Belfast has been extremely positive with highly skilled software engineers and our proximity to Europe helping us to grow and sustain our business," said Wombat's chief operations officer Danny Moore.
"By creating 77 new posts, which will deliver in excess of STG15 million in wages and salaries by 2010, we hope to take Wombat's Belfast centre of engineering excellence to an even more competive level and explore new market opportunities."
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