A brief history of our firm is summarized below. Our Branch Office Managers would welcome the opportunity to introduce you to our firm and our considerable capabilities to support the active, successful direct access trading community.
Assent LLC commenced operations in March 2003, in New Jersey where we maintain our headquarters in downtown Hoboken, a vibrant city on the shores of the Hudson River,just across from midtown Manhattan.
Upon creation of Assent LLC, we immediately set to work in furthering our established branch network of locations across the United Sates. We commenced our activities as Assent LLC with a status of being fully approved for self clearing, as well as being licensed for supporting correspondent clearance operations, and with certain pre-existing systems and infrastructure components that we have taken to the next levels of excellence. Since our founding, we remain focused on leveraging the tremendous energy and enthusiasm that successful traders have continued to add to the overall mix.
Shortly after the creation of Assent, we embarked on a strategic plan to deploy our ANVIL trading software, and an accompanyingAPI, throughout our extensive branch network. We remain energetically focused on enhancing this state of the art, incredibly powerful trading software. Our trading community has been actively involved in the ANVIL development process since its inception, and we’re grateful for the creative contributions of so many smart and talented traders. Within the first year of Assent LLC’s operations, we also kicked off an extensive initiative to significantly ramp up our remote trading platform. These efforts have been extremely successful to date, such that approximately a 1/3 of our trading community utilizes this service. We’ve been enhancing our remote platform consistently, year in and year out and we’ll continue to do so.
In 2004, Assent embarked on an extensive undertaking to build a state of the art data center within our Hoboken facility. Around this time, we formalized our data center hosting arrangements which several of our clients subscribe to in order to virtually eliminate latency factors. During this period, we also embarked on a major expansion of our remote trading platform, and converted our systems to be compatible with SSL, an encryption based security protocol widely used within the banking and brokerage industries. As 2004 drew to a close, we re-located our Order Desk to our Hoboken facility to further streamline our operations.
In 2005, our firm launched a major revamping of our Risk Management and Administrative Control modules of our software and re-structured our “middle ware” cluster of programs to comprise a newly integrated Hammer back end. As 2006 dawned, our firm integrated the on – line short sales stock locate service from locatestock.com which traders use to comply with short sale requirements.
In the ensuing years, we have continued to refine and improve our product offerings, including the aforementioned commencement of clearing services to correspondent broker – dealers. We are constantly reviewing strategic business opportunities that might make sense for our firm. In 2007, we launched a program called the Sponsored Brokerage Access Program which enables broker – dealers to use our clearance systems to complement their ability to comply with Regulation NMS, which went into effect in March 2007. Within the first 6 months of launching this program, we signed up ten (10) broker - dealers who now participate in our Sponsored Access Program. Although we remain committed to our core retail and proprietary trading business, we are also in the midst of re-launching our Institutional Product lines and expanding our capabilities to continue supporting the automated trading community. As 2007 drew to a close, we were busy working towards completing a multi - faceted development effort designed to further expand algorithmic based trading as well as introducing electronic options trading. We ended 2007 completing the necessary programming to further expand the scope of our direct access trading platform to include several additional "dark liquidity pools".
We’re proud of our becoming and remaining an industry leading, entrepreneurial firm within the direct access marketplace. We remain committed to the ideals of excellence, in every initiative we undertake. Our support staff and management team has many, many years of experience serving the needs of our trading community. We look forward to discussing with you how our experience, coupled with the vision we have for remaining an innovative, customer driven organization would be a good fit for your trading needs.
We invite you to peruse our site and use the Contact Us Page to get in touch with us!
