Daiwa Securities is launch its electronic trading platform in Asia for cash and listed derivatives.

The Japanese investment bank (which will be renamed Daiwa Capital Markets on 1 January 2010) said it will offer institutional clients globally the ability to trade in Australia, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, India and Taiwan through a suite of advanced electronic trading tools including algorithmic trading, crossing engine, Direct Market Access (DMA) trading and smart order router (SOR).

It said it has committed "significant resources" to building a first class electronic trading platform and plans to hire an additional dozen professionals in Japan and Hong Kong to serve clients across the region. It recently announced plans to invest 100bn yen in its Asia ex-Japan operations and to increase headcount in the region by more than 400.

Punit Mittal, global head of electronic trading at Daiwa, said: "The demand for electronic trading strategies has increased drastically in the last few years as more buy-side clients opt for the unbundling of research and execution to achieve better efficiency and lower transaction costs

"Helping clients enhance liquidity management is a key focus for Daiwa, given that 89% of total equity trading cost can be attributed to indirect costs such as market impact costs and opportunity costs due to information leakage."

Daiwa will also be launching a low-latency DMA platform using the co-location facility that will be provided by the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) after Arrowhead, TSE's next generation trading system, goes live in January 2010. Fast DMA will be mainly used by high-frequency traders who trade actively through computer-generated arbitrage models.

Toshinao Matsushima, managing director, head of global markets at Daiwa, said: "Daiwa is committed to becoming a full service investment bank in order to tap into the growing Asian markets. To that end, we are expanding across all divisions including investment banking, electronic trading, equity financing and derivatives to service global institutional clients."