Trading at financial markets and technologies are closely interconnected. Frequently the business solutions under implementation require support from technologies. And on the contrary, the development of technologies allows to create and offer new business solutions. One of such technologies is SOR (smart order routing) which is applied for consolidation of quotations from several trading platforms and for automated routing of clients' orders by virtue of a specified algorithm or regulation (for example, the best execution practice - execution of the client orders at the best price available at the markets).

Recently this technology has been widely used by the Russian banks for automation of customer service at the currency market. Diagram 1 shows one of the possible technological infrastructures for arrangement of the above service.

As sources of quotations and venues to execute the client orders there are the currency market of the Moscow Exchange, EBS market of the ICAP trading system and Thomson Reuters Spot Matching platform. The client orders sent by virtue of information of the aggregate "Level2Quotes" can be executed at any of the given markets depending on the rule of order performance set by the bank.

One of the areas for development of such systems which is widely used in practice is the determination and transmission of the best quotations for the required amount. In that model, the system surveys the trading platforms it has been connected with and forms the set of transactions which are the best ones by prices and which may provide a required amount of FX.

Another obvious area of development lies in connection of additional liquidity sources (cl. 1 at diagram 2). These can include almost all the electronic trading platforms of FX market being able to get integrated with outer systems. Classic examples are the markets as created by some international banks for their partners and customers, or interbank trading platforms. Technological integration with additional markets is usually performed through use of FIX protocol which is a de facto industrial standard for such projects.

Through use of FIX protocol, the bank's "algorithmic" customers will get connected to the trading platform of the bank (cl. 2 at diagram 2).

What if the bank resolves to arrange the electronic market inside to automate FX transactions with its customers and partners? In that case, the bank needs to choose the trading core from the line of offered technological solutions, which is most suitable for the selected types of instruments and transactions, as well as for the major part of client base (cl. 3 at diagram 2). Provided that a large number of transactions in the system are performed by the customers using their own software platforms, the said trading core shall be a quick operating one (the average time for processing of transactions is measured in microseconds, thousands of orders per second). If the major part of customers trade manually, the top priority is given to additional options (for example, regimes as address modes of trading).

Finally, to implement specific business models one may require automation of the process for a change of source quotations of trading platforms at the prescribed algorithm. One of the examples of such approach being applied is that the quotations (given to the customers) account for the bank's fees in the form of spread. Another example is a transmission of averageweighted quotations for a specific amount to the customers. In order to realize the abovementioned approaches, there are also software solutions (cl. 4 at diagram 2), which can be integrated into the bank's trading infrastructure.