Company Announcements

20 November 2020

RNS Reach

Aquis Exchange PLC

("Aquis" or the "Company")

Aquis works with SGX & AWS on an innovative trading deployment in the cloud

Proof of concept testing validates low-latency markets can be hosted entirely on the cloud

Aquis Exchange PLC (AQX.L), the exchange services group, is pleased to announce that its software development and licensing arm Aquis Technologies has completed a project in collaboration with Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to validate that complex exchange architecture and operations can work as efficiently in the cloud as in physical data centres.

While most major financial exchanges operate using physical data centres, the infrastructure required to run a trading environment is massive, costly and the required networking to connect to market participants is complex. If trading firms could leverage all the benefits of running a cloud-based solution, the cost optimisation, scalability and resiliency would make it very attractive.

Working alongside SGX, Asia's leading multi-asset exchange, and the AWS Transit Gateway team, Aquis was successful in developing a proof of concept to show running matching and messaging in the cloud is indeed a viable option.

The project produced a cloud-native financial exchange that had very low latency with minimal jitter (i.e. level of consistency) while using multicasting (technology used to transmit data to a group of destinations simultaneously) in a manner consistent with a highly liquid and regulated environment. 

Director of Aquis Technologies sales, Adrian Ip, said:

"The cloud-enabled marketplace we created has easy-to-manage infrastructure that is scalable and highly performant and would reduce the reliance on a data centre footprint and corresponding infrastructure and network overheads. This opens up a range of new possibilities for Aquis and for the whole exchange sector."

SGX's Head of Digital Services for Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities, Peter Shen added:

"SGX has always focused on building innovative market solutions for our participants. We have been an early adopter of public clouds for our platforms, and cloud-based matching engines have great potential to drive the next evolution in financial markets."

"We are excited by the results of the Aquis proof of concept with SGX, which defines a path to free customers from maintaining legacy on-premises infrastructure and implementing complex workarounds to run multicast workloads in the cloud," said Mayumi Hiramatsu, Vice President, EC2 Networking, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "With native support for multicast, AWS Transit Gateway makes it easy for Aquis to deploy trading applications that require multicast messaging while having the ability to monitor, manage, and scale multicast configurations for hundreds of receivers."

Enquiries:

Notes to editors:

Aquis Exchange PLC is an exchange services group, which operates pan-European cash equities trading businesses (Aquis Exchange), growth and regulated primary markets (Aquis Stock Exchange/AQSE) and develops/licenses exchange software to third parties (Aquis Technologies).

Aquis Exchange is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and France's Autorité des Marchés Financiers to operate Multilateral Trading Facility businesses in the UK and in EU27 respectively. Aquis operates a lit order book and does not allow aggressive non-client proprietary trading, which has resulted in lower toxicity and signalling risk on Aquis than other trading venues in Europe. According to independent studies, trades on Aquis are less likely to lead to price movement than on other lit markets. Aquis uses a subscription pricing model which works by charging users according to the message traffic they generate, rather than a percentage of the value of each stock that they trade.

Aquis Stock Exchange (AQSE) is a stock market providing primary and secondary markets for equity and debt products. It is authorised as a Recognised Investment Exchange, which allows it to operate a regulated listings venue.

Aquis Technologies is the software and technology division of Aquis Exchange PLC. It creates and licenses cutting-edge, cost-effective matching engine and trade surveillance technology for banks, brokers, investment firms and exchanges.

Aquis Exchange PLC (AQX.L) is listed on the Alternative Investment Market of the LSE (AIM) market. For more information, please go to www.aquis.eu