More financial businesses than ever before are heading towards the Middle East. According to industry analysts S&P Global, “Global private equity and venture capital firms have increasingly been targeting the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as accelerating technology adoption and the shift from economic dependence on fossil fuels provide investment opportunities.
“Deal value in the region reached $9.72 billion in the first half (of 2022), up from $9.55 billion a year earlier, and 66% compared with the first half of 2020”, continues the analysts.
For Colt and our customers, the recent acquisition of Lumen EMEA improves our reach and ability to serve these markets. We can now offer an even better experience and provide direct access to connectivity, meaning businesses in the region will no longer have to rely on sourcing their networking locally, improving visibility and quality of service.
Our capital market solutions support our financial customers and now with more capabilities: our extranet, exchange proximity and ultra-low latency solutions now connect to our expanded network via points of presence (PoPs) in the Middle East, South Africa and Kenya. This creates new opportunities for organisations, trading commodities and commodity derivative products in established markets like Dubai.
Prizmnet, our financial extranet service, connects to hundreds of exchanges, venues and service providers worldwide. Based on a private network owned by Colt with deterministic low latency, Prizmnet guarantees reliable, consistent and transparent content delivery to financial firms in the industry’s critical exchange locations.
Whatever your strategic plans, security is always front of mind. This expansion includes an enhanced security portfolio that’s dedicated to capital market customers, including DDoS protection, Zero Trust Network Gateway, network-based security and managed firewall customer premises equipment (CPE).
Our customers already connected to MENA are one step ahead of the competition, having already established a presence in an area that will receive more and more private equity investment.
Reaching the Middle East
To show how Colt can help you expand into MENA, we’ve crafted a fictional example of a business which wants to tap into the region.
A global trading infrastructure vendor is looking to access new markets and consolidate an existing set-up in the Middle Eastern region. It needs access to market data and trading flow into the exchange matching engine to grow and establish its presence in Dubai.
So how can Colt help?
Prizmnet connects this vendor to the region with its low latency connectivity, an already established Colt network, our newest EMEA-based PoPs and our local partners. We may already be connected to an exchange that they’re interested in working with, making connecting to them even quicker and easier.
Our connections are fully resilient end-to-end, featuring two separate A and B paths for redundancy that ensure no single point of failure occurs, giving peace of mind that no data is lost and it will reach its destination securely.
We fully manage services and consolidate connections, allowing them to focus on business while we handle the other networks, exchanges and regulatory offices that they tap into. If they already work with another exchange but are interested in migrating to Colt, we’d handle that entire market migration too.
They can also leave the Layer 3 network IP addressing to us. Each service is logically provisioned over dual physical links, and we can add new services or make changes whenever their business needs it.
Our state-of-the-art proprietary monitoring portal lets them check circuits for latency, jitter and packet loss variability in real time, so they are always kept up to date on the performance of their connection. And if they ever have a query, our around-the-clock, dedicated service desk is always on hand to deal with exchange-based connectivity questions.
If your business is in a similar situation and you’d like to speak to our expert capital market sales team, contact us today to start making extraordinary connections in the Middle East.
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