Australia ASX Responds to Independent Review of Its Trade outage

Australian financial market exchanges ASX Group today released an update on its trade outrage occurred on 16 November 2020, responding to the review conducted by the independent expert IBM Australia Limited.

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Let’s recall that, on 16 November 2020, an outage occurred​ shortly after a major upgrade to ASX’s equity trading platform, ASX Trade, called the ASX Trade Refresh project.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) view operational incidents of this nature with significant concern. To examine the issues, the regulators informed ASX of their expectation that an independent review of the ASX Trade Refresh project be conducted in the first half of 2021.

The independent expert found that ASX met or exceeded leading industry practices in 58 out of 75 of the capabilities assessed. But, the independent expert identified several key shortcomings in the project, including ASX’s near zero appetite for service disruption, gaps in the rigour applied to the project delivery risk and issue management process and so on.

Further, the independent expert made recommendations in seven key categories: risk, governance, delivery, requirements, vendor management, testing and incident management.

“We acknowledge the findings in the report. It’s pleasing that ASX met or exceeded leading industry practicesin most areas. But the report does point to some important areas for improvement and we will address all of its recommendations,”Dominic Stevens, ASX Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer responded.

“ASX is well advanced in developing a detailed response plan for execution over the next 12 to 18 months, and we’ll commission the independent expert to review our actions to meet its recommendations. Our delivery of this program of work will be under the oversight of ASIC and the RBA,” Stevens added.