Which term describes the infrastructure that a participant uses to access trading, provided by a third party?

Which term describes the infrastructure that a participant uses to access trading, provided by a third party?

• A. Co-Location
• B. Application Service Provider
• C. Shares, rights, options, CHF bonds, Investment funds
• D. ETFs, ETSFs, ETPs, Non-Swiss Bonds, Structured Products

Answer: (B)

The main idea here is outsourcing the trading software and connectivity to an external service. An Application Service Provider delivers the trading platform and the access route to the markets as a service, so a participant uses that third‑party infrastructure to reach trading venues without running the whole system in-house. Co-location, by contrast, is about physically placing a firm’s own systems in the exchange’s data center to reduce latency—it's a hardware/location arrangement, not the service that provides trading access. The other options describe types of financial instruments, not infrastructure for accessing trading. So the best fit is Application Service Provider.

The main idea here is outsourcing the trading software and connectivity to an external service. An Application Service Provider delivers the trading platform and the access route to the markets as a service, so a participant uses that third‑party infrastructure to reach trading venues without running the whole system in-house.

Co-location, by contrast, is about physically placing a firm’s own systems in the exchange’s data center to reduce latency—it's a hardware/location arrangement, not the service that provides trading access. The other options describe types of financial instruments, not infrastructure for accessing trading. So the best fit is Application Service Provider.