Tora, an Asia-based provider of trading technology and financial services, is expanding Tora Crosspoint to cover new markets including Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia, following the launch of the service for Japan. 

Tora Crosspoint is an off-exchange liquidity venue comprised of Tora’s internal liquidity flow and the aggregation of liquidity from multiple venues in Asia, such as broker crossing engines and third-party pools.

It provides the trading community with a central point of access to multiple off-exchange liquidity venues without requiring any changes to their existing workflow.  
 
Tora Crosspoint was launched for Japan in February 2010 leveraging the internal liquidity that crosses at Tora. Equity crossing venues including Credit Suisse’s Crossfinder, Japannext and Kabu.com have recently linked to Tora Crosspoint, creating access to broad liquidity in the region.  Several additional partners are expected to connect to Tora Crosspoint over the next few months. 
 
“Tora Crosspoint is unique in that it seeks liquidity in parallel with the user’s everyday order flow.  This is a breakthrough for traders in Asia who previously had to manually post their order flow, often resulting in low crossing rates and poor user experience,” says Robert Dykes, chief executive of Tora. “In addition, Tora Crosspoint offers the ability to bring together leading crossing engines and pools, so traders have broad access to off-exchange liquidity with an easy-to-use experience.” 
 
Tora Crosspoint currently captures over four per cent of total trading volume of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It offered over USD1.5bn of daily liquidity in over 1,800 individual equities during the first quarter 2010.  
 
The decision to expand Tora Crosspoint comes after the announcement in February that Goldman Sachs Group made a minority investment in Tora. Tora will use the proceeds from the investment to accelerate expansion.