The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) will require the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to publish a comparison of its clearing and settlement fees with international providers, with the goal of encouraging competitiveness.
The ASX must ensure transparent and fair pricing for its clearing and settlement services, offer its services on non-discriminatory commercial terms, and allow third-party access to its technology systems, ASIC said.
“This is about limiting ASX’s ability to misuse its monopoly power to deter new entrants,” said ASIC chair Joe Longo.
“The new rules support the long-term confident and informed participation of investors in Australian financial markets by establishing clear obligations to promote competitive outcomes in the provision of clearing and settlement services.”
These rules were introduced under the 2023 Competition in Clearing and Settlement reforms, which gave ASIC the ability to regulate the ASX’s cash equity clearing and settlement facilities.
ASIC began investigating a December outage in the ASX’s CHESS settlement system earlier this month. A Batch Settlement planned for 20 December was postponed to the following Monday after CHESS reported an outage due to an error in its memory allocation software.
The CHESS system will be replaced in two phases, the ASX said last year, with completion expected in 2030.
The Reserve Bank of Australia also said in September that the ASX’s clearing and settlement facilities should lower the complexity of its vendor management systems, and mandate its core processes across all vendors supporting clearing and settlement facilities.
