Some of the world's largest brokers and asset managers had to revert to decade-old methods to process trades on Friday, after a fire at the offices of one of the main post-trade service provider temporarily disabled connection to the primary and back-up data centres for some of its clients.

Omgeo, which enables 6,000 global brokers and clients to automatically process trades, was hit by a fire at around lunchtime in the UK and the start of the US markets on Friday, which knocked out the group's primary data centre at its Boston headquarters.