A little-known Swedish provider of trading systems has beaten rivals to win a lucrative contract to build a new platform, less than a week after it was chosen over Nordic exchange operator OMX to provide technology for the putative equities market Project Turquoise.

Alpha Trading Systems, a company established in May by nine Canadian banks to build and run a new equity trading platform to rival the nation's stock exchanges, said today it had selected Cinnober, a Swedish vendor, to develop its alternative trading system.