[blue11]

All of that is just marketing talk.

IEX is currently not an exchange. What they offer is a dark pool connected in series with a Smart Order Router. That's what all the big brokers (e.g., JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, etc.) have been offering to their customers for years and their dark pools usually offer a lot more liquidity. The big brokers have become better and better and smart order router technology to protect their customers as much as possible from HFTs. IEX is at least 5 years late to the party.

Perhaps they are planning on becoming an exchange one day, but I am not sure how they can do that while slowing down order executions. It seems to me that that would be a serious violation of Regulation NMS.