OPRA, the Options Price Reporting Authority in the USA, has just announced that individual user firms will need to be equipped to handle over 3 million messages per second by January 2010, and over 4 million messages per second by January 2011. Note that the unit of time measurement is "per second".

In the back-office securities sector and in the payments sector, we're used to hearing about utilities handling millions of messages per day. 10 million, 20 million - whether it's a national payments clearing house or an international messaging hub, the unit of time measurement is "per day".

To save you getting out your calculator, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. The difference between front-office message volumes and back-office message volumes is that big.

"But a back-office message is bigger than a front-office message", I hear you say. It could be a thousand times bigger, but it still wouldn't be anywhere near the 86,400 differentiator.

If you want to get economies of scale in your message processing, a sensible approach looks like it should be to build your system around your front-office requirements and use the same technology to handle your back-office securities and payments messages as well. That way all of your other messaging needs should get the benefits of the economies of scale generated in the front office.

Or you could carry on using small-scale technology to handle separately your relatively low-volume of back-office and payments messages, achieve no economies of scale, and be the most expensive message processor in the world. As Clint says - "Are you feeling lucky?"