Capizar® Sovereign Real-Time Exchange Matching & Clearing Modernization
Pakistan Stock Exchange & East African Bourses
InfoTech's Capizar platform demonstrated unmatched resilience during peak market volatility, scaling order matching throughput to institutional standards without a millisecond of slippage.
Overview
InfoTech engineered and deployed a sovereign, ultra-low latency exchange matching and clearing infrastructure for tier-1 bourses across Pakistan and East Africa. By implementing the high-concurrency Capizar® matching core with FPGA hardware acceleration and direct ISO 20022 clearing integrations, InfoTech modernized regional market operations into resilient institutional trading hubs capable of sustaining extreme volatility surges without downtime.
The Challenge
Sovereign exchange infrastructure across Pakistan and East Africa had been operating on first-generation matching engines designed for an era of manual trading floors and regional market fragmentation. These legacy cores processed orders sequentially, introducing latency spikes of up to 12 milliseconds during peak open-session surges — an eternity in modern algorithmic trading. Order book integrity failures were a recurring risk as market volumes grew 40% year-on-year and arbitrage participants demanded sub-millisecond execution guarantees.
Beyond throughput, regulatory compliance with CPMI-IOSCO PFMI principles and local exchange directives mandated end-to-end trade lifecycle auditability, real-time margin computation, and guaranteed delivery of FIX 5.0 SP2 messages to institutional participants without packet loss. The technical debt accumulated over two decades of incremental patching left no viable upgrade path — a full engine replacement was the only route forward, and it had to be executed without a single session of market downtime.
The Solution
InfoTech deployed the Capizar® Core Matching Engine — purpose-built in C++20 with hardware-level FPGA acceleration for deterministic order processing. The engine was rolled out across dual-active, air-gapped data centres in both Karachi and Nairobi, with sub-millisecond state replication ensuring zero data divergence between active nodes. Multicast FIX market data feeds were restructured using kernel-bypass networking, eliminating OS-level interrupt latency and achieving consistent sub-28 microsecond tick-to-trade execution.
The real-time risk margin gateway was rebuilt as a co-located service within the matching core, evaluating pre-trade risk rules — including position limits, concentration limits, and dynamic circuit breaker thresholds — without adding measurable round-trip delay. A microservices-based clearing layer was layered on top, managing trade settlement, CCP netting, and daily position reconciliation with full ISO 20022 message alignment. Full PFMI compliance was achieved through automated audit logging, DVP settlement processing, and built-in regulatory reporting pipelines delivered to the respective market authorities.
Strategy & Methodology
InfoTech adopted a phased, zero-downtime cutover strategy centered around dual-hot simulation and kernel-bypass hardware staging. The architecture was deployed in parallel with the legacy matching engine, allowing live shadow trading verification across equities and debt markets over a 90-day validation window. Automated reconciliation pipelines validated millions of order state transitions against regulatory PFMI benchmarks before the final instantaneous ledger switchover.
Impact & Results
The Capizar® deployment transformed capital market operations across 13 sovereign trading venues, achieving consistent sub-28 microsecond tick-to-trade execution that surpassed the performance thresholds of tier-1 global exchange operators. Five-nines operational availability — 99.999% uptime — was maintained across all connected market segments, including equities, fixed income, derivatives, and government securities.
Order throughput capacity scaled 10x relative to the prior infrastructure, sustaining millions of order events per second during multi-year peak sessions without queue depth degradation. Full PFMI regulatory compliance was certified by independent external auditors, enabling the exchanges to attract new categories of institutional participants — including international proprietary trading firms and sovereign wealth fund desks — previously deterred by execution quality concerns. The trading ecosystem modernization directly contributed to an 18% year-on-year increase in market liquidity depth across all instrument classes.