The London Stock Exchange on Tuesday took a step towards rolling out a pan-European share trading business by picking Fidessa, a trading technology and market data company, and BNP Paribas, as technology partners for Baikal, its planned block trading platform.

The choice of Fidessa is significant since it is one of the largest providers of the connections between trading venues and the trading community – and thus will facilitate access to so-called “order flow” from a wide variety of asset and funds managers.