IG Index

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From their Website:
IG Index is part of IG Group Holdings plc, a UK company listed on the London Stock Exchange, and a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. The Group is headquartered in London while the IG Group also has offices in America, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Luxembourg.

The IG Group has over 100,000 clients worldwide, making more than one million transactions per month. In the year to May 2009, the Group achieved a turnover of £257m (up 40%), and generated a record profit before tax of £131m (up 33%). The Group's financial businesses opened more than 74,000 accounts during the year (up 74%), with over 90% of all client trades are conducted online via ourPureDeal dealing platform.

Pioneers of spread betting
IG Index was initially established to give investors the opportunity to bet on movements in the price of gold, without having to actually buy or sell the physical commodity in the market. When founder Stuart Wheeler hit upon the idea of trading the price of gold as an index, IG Index was born, laying the groundwork for financial spread betting as we now know it in the UK.

The new and exciting concept of spread betting, compared with traditional commodity trading, quickly became apparent. Since those early days in the mid-1970s financial spread betting has grown exponentially, particularly in the last decade, offering traders and investors a unique combination of flexibility, speed of execution and tax-free* profits.

Developing new markets
IG Index expanded rapidly throughout the 1990s. In 1995 IG Index extended its spread betting offering to include individual publicly traded shares; a first in the UK.

Then, in 1998, IG Index launched an online dealing platform specifically designed for financial spread betting; another first in the UK.

The company continued to expand, widening its operations to include foreign exchange dealing, Contracts for Difference (CFD) and sports spread betting, under the IG Group banner.