BGC Partners, a fixed-income, inter-dealer broker, spent the end of the year gearing up for two important technology upgrades. The first is an internal firm-wide roll out of BGC Trader, a trading graphical user interface developed for BGC by eSpeed. The firm, which has traditionally been a voice broker, plans to offer a hybrid model where traders can call orders into a broker or type in orders through a trading graphical user interface it calls BGC Trader. Both orders interact with the same liquidity pool. This hybrid model will eventually be available across all the IDB's products, but has first been rolled out with credit default swaps in Europe. BGC's second important technology upgrade is its merger with eSpeed, which will be finalized this quarter. The merged companies will be traded on the Nasdaq and called BGC Partners. The merger will allow BGC to make further in-house enhancements to BGC Trader as electronic brokering in the IDB market evolves. To read more about the BGC Trader rollout, click here