The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has been told by the country’s central bank that it needs to fix aspects of its clearing and settlement system operations following a market outage on 16 November 2020, which the group said it will take into account as it prepares to shift to a new distributed ledger technology (DLT) based platform.
The move of CHESS – ASX’s equities clearing and settlement system – to a DLT platform through the help of Digital Asset has been planned since 2016 but wrought with delays. In an AGM address, its chairman confirmed the exchange is still on-track for go-live in April 2023.
ASX CEO, Dominic Stevens, seemed to vent some frustration surrounding the incident during the AGM when he said: “The amount of transformation, reduction in technology debt and lowering of inherent risk has never been as high as in the last five years and will get even better in the next two. Reducing incidents and outages by circa 90% underscores the reduction in operational risk, however, we will continue to work hard on the last 10%. It is disappointing that this big picture resilience story struggles to get public traction.”