The ASX has put four potential future enhancements up for industry consultation, forming part of its efforts to meet ASIC’s expectations on market resilience.
The regulator outlined its expectations for market operators last November in its response to an outage at the ASX in 2020.
In June, the ASX released the first of three planned consultation papers, which primarily focused on its existing procedures and current capabilities during incidents.
The second consultation paper, released this week, outlines and provides technical details in regard to potential future enhancements to these procedures and capabilities.
The four enhancements up for consultation include a new order download service, a new trade download service, a ‘cancel-only’ session state, and an intraday restart capability.
“As part of ASX’s ongoing commitment to work with all stakeholders during this consultation, we will again, conduct a range of group and one-on-one meetings over the next six weeks,” the market operator stated.
The ASX and ASIC have encouraged all stakeholders to engage in the consultation, which will remain open until 9 December. In a separate statement, the regulator said that it welcomed the ASX’s latest industry consultation on improving market resilience.
“ASIC continues to engage with market operators and participants as they implement steps to meet our expectations to improve the resilience of the Australian equity market during trading outages,” commented ASIC commissioner, Danielle Press.
“This includes facilitating trading on alternative markets in such situations.”
According to ASIC, market participants have so far made “good progress”, with a survey of participants representing around 90 per cent of equity market trading demonstrating that most now either meet all of its expectations or are progressing the necessary changes.
The regulator noted that this ongoing work is also coinciding with other significant changes in the industry, including the much delayed CHESS replacement project, and has called on market operators and participants to ensure that initiatives are implemented in a reasonable time frame.
“These are important steps to develop new, improved responses to any future market outages, and ASIC urges all market operators and stakeholders participate in this process,” said Ms Press.
“ASIC will continue to monitor progress by market operators and participants against its expectations.”
Jon Bragg
Jon Bragg is a journalist for Momentum Media's Investor Daily, nestegg and ifa. He enjoys writing about a wide variety of financial topics and issues and exploring the many implications they have on all aspects of life.
