The New York Stock Exchange’s technology arm this week launched a range of new hosted services that it describes as "the financial services industry’s first cloud platform".

Hosted in the stock exchange’s data centre and based on technology from VMware and EMC, the Capital Markets Community Platform offers trading firms such services as low latency trading and regulatory reporting, as well as market and risk analysis.

"All of this comes with absolutely no hardware investment, costly infrastructure maintenance or extended time to market for customers, giving them the opportunity to focus on their core business strategies," said Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies.

"Cloud platforms now offer trading firms a range of new capabilities and efficiencies that should lead to lower costs, more resiliency and broader market access with less complexity," said IDC analyst Michael Versace of the launch. "All of this translates into market advantage."

In April, UK telco and services provider BT said that its Radianz financial services platform, which it describes as "the world’s leading managed cloud for the financial services community", now has 15,000 members.

BT Radianz, which grants users access to financial applications and information feeds, is also built on VMware software, with servers from Hewlett-Packard and storage from NetApp.