ASX Taps Fidessa for Smart Order Router

With the imminent arrival of Chi-X Australia's trading platform, officials from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) have enlisted trading platform and market connectivity vendor Fidessa to help the exchange prepare for the coming market fragmentation by developing a co-located smart order-routing trading application.

The Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC) granted a license to Chi-X in May 2011 to launch a trading platform, upending the monopoly enjoyed by the ASX.

"We have studied the impact of multi-market regulatory change, and its effect on market structure and trading, in many other places around the world," says Peter Hiom, deputy CEO at ASX. "We see Fidessa as an essential part of our new positioning—alongside our other initiatives such as the commissioning of the new ASX Australian Liquidity Centre, providing low-latency, high-capacity co-location services, and our new order book, ASX PureMatch, for trading the top 300 ASX stocks and domestic exchange-traded fund (ETF) products."

The ASX Best smart order-routing application—which will provide connectivity to all the country's lit and dark venues, such as ASX's VolumeMatch—enables participants to meet best-execution obligations. It will also allow users to control the priority of venues to which orders are routed, and direct to specific places.

The router will be co-located in a new ASX datacenter due to be commissioned later this year, and distributed to users around the country via ASX Net, the exchange's high-capacity fiber optic network.

The exchange is also working to provide solutions to the technical, regulatory and operational challenges faced by participants and their clients in Australia's migration to a multi-market environment later this year, says David Raper, general manager, trade execution and information services at the ASX.