Nasdaq was recently selected by a committee comprised of the 14 exchanges and FINRA to continue to operate the Tape C Securities Information Processor (SIP), responsible for collecting quotes for Nasdaq-listed stocks and disseminating the National Best Bid or Offer (NBBO), according to the Wall Street Journal. While the last round of voting was unanimous, a subsidiary of Tradeworx, a high frequency trading firm, delivered sufficient competition to merit multiple rounds of voting.
As a part of its bid to run the SIP, Nasdaq committed to reduce the time it takes to consolidate and disseminate the information from the current 58 microseconds for quotes and 59 microseconds for trades to just 25 microseconds by 2017. Nasdaq will also improve its ability to reduce outages by maintaining a backup system that runs in parallel to the SIP that can be switched over almost instantaneously in the event of an issue with the live system. Such a move was likely meant to address criticisms arising from a 3-hour outage of the facility that occurred in August 2013.