Lava Announces Addition of ''Staging Area'' to LavaFX Product Suite New Feature Allows FX Orders To Be Pre-Loaded And Staged For Error-Free Execution.

NEW YORK & LONDON -- Lava Trading Inc., the innovative technology firm that develops high-performance trading solutions for the financial services industry, today announced the launch of Staging Area, a pioneering new feature of the LavaFX(TM) foreign exchange product suite.

Developed through dialogue with leading trading firms, Staging Area simplifies execution during the order management process and has been in use with a select group of large buy-side customers for over three months. It permits asset managers, hedge funds, CTAs, and signal driven traders to seamlessly load and manage orders individually or in batches and ensure executions are within size, side and price restrictions. External order management systems can serve as direct input to Staging Area, permitting orders to flow unaltered via STP into LavaFX for execution. Once orders are part of Staging Area, they can be passed between multiple traders, who can execute against the orders using Lava's advanced execution functionality and receive a running detailed status of outstanding and completed orders.

"Staging Area provides significant new functionality for electronic foreign exchange," said David Ogg, Chief Executive Officer, LavaFX. "For the first time, precise electronic orders generated from trading signals will be integrated within an execution platform. Once a signal is triggered, traders can instantly see the orders they are to execute and firms can have confidence that positions and other order parameters will not be violated. It will provide truly error-free trading."

Built upon Lava's leading, proprietary technology core, LavaFX is a premier offering in electronic foreign exchange trading. It offers a Central Limit Order Book of live dealable prices, full price transparency and depth of book, and the ability to place bids and offers, together with Lava's sophisticated order types. The system aggregates multiple sources of FX liquidity into a single access point, which can be tapped via the fast, intuitive LavaFX user interface, or through a FIX API geared towards model and program traders.

In the coming year, Lava plans additional platform enhancements to LavaFX. These include continued improvement in liquidity working in concert with partner banks and other platforms, unique new functionality, and the introduction of new algorithmic order types to help with the seamless execution of large block orders.

About Lava Trading Inc.

Headquartered in New York City, with locations in California, Connecticut and the United Kingdom, Lava Trading Inc. is an innovative technology firm that develops high-performance trading solutions for the financial services industry. Lava products are created as true ASP solutions built to withstand maximum volumes in the most volatile conditions. As a cost effective and neutral provider, Lava's OTC, Listed and Foreign Exchange solutions are used by leading broker/dealers, including most of the top U.S. investment banks, as well as market makers, hedge funds and institutional investors. With its patented technology and capital markets expertise, Lava creates value-added trading solutions that combine speed, intelligence and reliability. Lava is a wholly owned, independently-operated subsidiary of Citigroup, Inc. (NYSE: C) and member NASD/SIPC. For more information, visit www.lavatrading.com.