European equity trading takes place across 130+ exchanges, trading venues and APAs. For trading firms and others, building a complete picture of market activity often means sourcing data from multiple venues and data sources and bringing it together to support trading, analysis and execution decisions. This process can be both costly and operationally complex.
With the launch of EuroCTP in July 2026, market participants are now considering how they will access the data, where it will sit within their infrastructure and how it will be distributed across the business.
EuroCTP, a joint venture of 16 European exchange groups, has been selected to operate the Shares and ETF tape. It will consolidate pre and post trade data from trading and trade reporting venues across the European Union into a single, real-time feed, giving market participants a unified view of liquidity, pricing and volume, something that has not previously existed at a pan-European level.
Waypoint Trading Solutions, a TNS business, is an official redistributor of the EuroCTP feed, providing connectivity to both firms that contribute data to the tape and those that consume it. That dual role gives Waypoint visibility across both sides of the market and provides a useful perspective on how organizations are preparing for the service.
What EuroCTP Changes and Why it Matters in Practice
By aggregating pre and post trade data through a consolidated source, EuroCTP gives traders and others real-time visibility across the full European landscape.
For firms operating under MiFID II and MiFIR, it may provide an additional tool to support best execution processes and help assess execution quality against an independent market reference point. For some firms, using a consolidated source of market data may reduce the cost and complexity associated with managing multiple direct feeds.
Trading desks can benefit from access to a European Best Bid and Offer (EBBO), helping to improve visibility of liquidity across venues and supporting routing decisions.
The tape may also support resilience during periods of disruption – if a venue experiences an outage, participants can use EuroCTP’s consolidated view to route orders to alternative trading venues.
For many firms EuroCTP will provide the authoritative independence European markets may have previously lacked, and regulators, traders and compliance teams increasingly need.
How Waypoint Connects Firms to the Tape
As an official EuroCTP redistributor, Waypoint delivers the raw multicast feed directly within the major European primary and secondary data centers of Equinix FR2 in Frankfurt and Aruba IT3 in Bergamo. These are the two designated EuroCTP distribution centers, meaning firms connecting via Waypoint can access the feed at source through Waypoint’s low-latency infrastructure.
Connectivity is available through Waypoint’s low latency network and extranet networks, with the low-latency network engineered to minimize round-trip times and built with comprehensive end-to-end diversity across the A and B feeds. The infrastructure is designed not just for current data volumes but for the increases anticipated as the tape becomes more widely adopted.
Importantly, Waypoint already has the feeds live on its network, which can support a faster time to market for clients: connectivity can be activated promptly, often without waiting for lengthy provisioning cycles. In addition, as Waypoint’s European backbone connects multiple data centers, the EuroCTP feed can be delivered to any location a client needs it across the network footprint.
Supporting Both Sides of the Tape
Connectivity to the tape is often thought of in terms of delivering the feed to buy-side and sell-side firms that want to receive it. Waypoint also supports exchanges and trading venues that are required to contribute data to the tape. For contributing venues, reliable, low-latency connectivity to the distribution centers will be important.
What Firms Should Consider Thinking About
Firms need to determine how they will connect to the tape, whether they are consuming it for trading and compliance purposes or contributing to it as a venue. They should consider where on their network they want the feed delivered, and whether their current infrastructure can handle the data volumes involved.
Additionally, firms should consider thinking about distribution. For some, receiving the EuroCTP feed at one location is sufficient. For others – particularly those with trading operations across multiple European sites – the ability to distribute the feed across a wide network backbone is a strategic operational consideration.
As launch approaches, firms preparing to consume or contribute to EuroCTP should take steps to confirm their connectivity, resilience and distribution arrangements are ready to support the service from day one.
Yousaf Hafeez is Head of Business Development for Waypoint Trading Solutions’ Radianz portfolio. His focus is on strategic capital market accounts including market data vendors, exchanges and trading platforms.
