Morgan Stanley appointed Pankaj Dhake as a new electronic sales trader, based in Mumbai. Dhake joins Morgan Stanley from CLSA, where he spent nearly seven years, most recently as an electronic sales trader. This followed a stint as an associate at CLSA – a position he held for nearly two years. Prior to joining CLSA, Dhake was a senior quantitative researcher at WorldQuant. Elsewhere in his career, Dhake served as a global equity derivatives trader at UBS.

Eric Kohler was appointed to Kepler Cheuvreux’s high touch trading team based in New York. Most recently Kohler worked as an international equity trader at Citi for more than three and a half years having previously served as a commodities sales and trading analyst at the firm. He has also served stints at both Morgan Stanley and UBS Wealth Management. In the role, he is set to help the firm grow its execution footprint and expertise across North America – a key strategic base for Kepler Cheuvreux.

Jamie Crank was named group executive technology and data at the Australian stock exchange, ASX. Prior to this appointment, he was general manager in the trading and markets division, and before that general manager of information and connectivity services for ASX.  He will officially begin his role on 9 September. According to ASX the appointment followed “an extensive external and internal search process”. Sydney-based Crank has worked in the industry across various exchanges for two decades. He has previously served at Chi-X Australia and the London Stock Exchange.

Crédit Agricole appointed Ryan Jones vice president, Latin American (LatAm) RFX trader, based in New York. Jones joins Crédit Agricole from Natixis Corporate and Investment Banking where he spent nearly three years, most recently as vice president, LatAm FX trader. Prior to that, Jones held the same position as an associate. Before joining Crédit Agricole, Jones spent three years at Standard Chartered Bank – also based in New York – most recently as a LatAm RFX trader.

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Jamie Crank has been named group executive technology and data at the Australian stock exchange, ASX.

Prior to this appointment, he was general manager in the trading and markets division, and before that general manager of information and connectivity services for ASX. 

He will officially begin his role on 9 September. According to ASX the appointment followed “an extensive external and internal search process”. 

Sydney-based Crank has worked in the industry across various exchanges for two decades. He has previously served at Chi-X Australia and the London Stock Exchange.

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ASX will implement TCS’ flagship product, TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure, set to be implemented in two releases – first the clearing service, followed by the settlement depository and sub‐register services.

According to the business, the two stages are “expected to reduce overall delivery risk and help manage the impact on industry stakeholders”.

The TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure solution is specifically designed specifically for central securities depositories (CSDs), central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs), exchanges, and central banks.

Australia is one of TCS’ fastest growing regions, the firm said. TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure has been adopted by market infrastructure institutions across over 20 jurisdictions.

Vivekanand Ramgopal, president, BFSI products and platforms at TCS, said: “Our selection is an affirmation of our track record in this mission-critical business, continuous investments in our products, and shared vision of how we see the future of Market Infrastructure Institutions in a technology-led world. TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure continues to gain traction in the global market with its rich functionality and unique multi-asset class capability across the post-trade value chain.

“Combined with our fit-for-purpose approach to technology and innovation, this gives us the confidence to deliver a robust future-proof solution stack for the Australian market.”

ASX walked away from its planned distributed ledger technology (DLT) project to replace its legacy clearing and settlement system in November 2022, ending a six-year journey filled with delays and criticism.

The project, first announced in 2016, was once seen as the poster child of innovation within the market infrastructure and post-trade space, being the first blockchain project launched amid an era of belief that the technology could revolutionise the plumbing of the financial services industry.

Instead of completion, the project ended after six years of delays and uncertainty. At the time, ASX said it would write off between AUD$245-255 million, while the Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported it may have to “compensate trading firms that spent at least $100 million on their own upgrades”.

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Though ultimately a decision driven by regulators, the ASX this month will survey business committee members for “high level views” with summarised feedback to be discussed in a July meeting. 

Speaking on a webinar hosted by the The Australian Custodial  Services Association, Karen Webb, senior Manager, issuer services, securities and payments at ASX, said that Australia is in a ‘wait and see what happens’ position, with regards to the transition in the US and Canada, and explorations by taskforces in countries like the UK.  

“We’re really interested in seeing what the reasons are underpinning those changes – there’s a fair bit of work to do on the costs and benefits,” Webb said. 

“More recently we have included the discussion for T+1 settlement on the business committee – our key industry forum for discussions on clearing and settlement – [and] if we were to make any recommendations to change to T+1, those recommendations would ultimately go to our clearing and settlement boards who would review from a number of perspectives and ultimately agree or not agree.” 

Australia moved to T+2 in 2016 at a similar time to the US, however the American market has now pushed on ahead of other major markets in Europe and Asia with its T+1 plans, leaving other markets facing tough decisions over their own future moves in terms of industry alignment. 

“In absence of regulatory guidance on moving to T+1, our view is that it is not an ASX decision but we need a consensus across the industry,” said Webb. “The industry view should be reached by market stakeholders.” 

Within its survey, the ASX will explore the impact on members’ operations by the transition to T+1 in other markets while Australia remains on T+2, what might need to change to support a transition and corporate action perspectives. 

The consultation will also seek input on scope, with the move to T+1 co-ordinated across equities and debt as well as its neighbouring country New Zealand. 

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The 

The project, first announced in 2016, was once seen as the poster child of innovation within the market infrastructure and post-trade space, being the first blockchain project launched amid an era of belief that the technology could revolutionise the plumbing of the financial services industry. 

Instead of completion, the project now ends after six years of delays and uncertainty. ASX said it will write off between AUD$245-255 million, while the Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported it may have to “compensate trading firms that spent at least $100 million on their own upgrades”. 

The delays and issues began rolling in from 2018 with industry participants first requesting delays, and then Covid and an outage delaying matters. 

With testing opened in recent years and multiple live dates given, the project appeared to be moving forward at times. However, in August this year, ASX said the platform was unlikely to go live before 2024 due to commissioning an independent review of the new CHESS application. The aim was to identify necessary actions for ASX to communicate a revised timetable to finish the project.   

“On behalf of ASX, I apologise for the disruption experienced in relation to the CHESS replacement project over a number of years,” ASX chairman Damian Roche said in a statement today. “ASX always endeavours to act in the best interests of the market, and I thank our customers and other stakeholders for their patience and support. Today’s decision has been made by the ASX Limited and Clearing and Settlement Boards, and it has not been made lightly.” 

The exchange said it will now reassess all aspects of the CHESS replacement project following completion of the aforementioned independent review, conducted by Accenture, and its own internal assessment. 

The announcement drew a statement from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Reserve Bank of Australia, where the bodies described the news as a “significant setback to the replacement of critical national infrastructure for Australia’s cash equity markets” 

Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe added: “The announcement by ASX after many years of investment by both ASX and industry is very disappointing. ASX needs to prioritise developing a new plan to deliver safe and reliable clearing and settlement infrastructure. The Reserve Bank of Australia also expects ASX to maintain the current CHESS so that it continues to operate reliably and support confidence in Australia’s cash equity markets.” 

Digital Asset has moved on to multiple other projects in the financial services space since the ASX announcements including partnerships with Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and Deutsche Boerse. 

Digital Asset had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

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The pushbacks have become a regular occurrence from the Australian exchange operator for the project first announced in 2016.

The latest communication comes just days after Helen Lofthouse took over ASX as CEO. In a note, Tim Hogben, group executive, securities and payments at ASX, explained that Lofthouse has expressed support for the CHESS replacement project and will bring “a fresh set of eyes”.

“Helen is seeking an independent assessment of the new application and the remaining deliverables, and supports a process that will strengthen stakeholder confidence,” he added.

ASX will engage Accenture to provide an independent review of the new CHESS application, with the aim to identify necessary actions for ASX to communicate a revised timetable to finish the project.

ASX’s partner on the CHESS replacement – Digital Asset – will work in cooperation with ASX and Accenture to complete the review. The review is expected to commence in August and to take approximately 12 weeks with ASX revealing the findings at the conclusion.

“I know our customers will be as disappointed as I am with the uncertainty about the timeline for completion,” said Lofthouse. “I apologise for the uncertainty and thank them for their close and constructive work with us on this important project.

“ASX continues to invest in the existing CHESS system, and has already significantly strengthened its capacity, speed and resilience to cater for the increased trading activity in recent years. Existing CHESS remains secure and stable, and continues to perform well as we transition to a replacement CHESS system.”

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Before joining ASX, she served as managing director at UBS for close to four years and prior to that, held various senior positions at JP Morgan, where she spent nearly 14 years. Dominic Stevens will continue to serve as CEO until 31 July 2022 and following Lofthouse’s promotion, he will continue to advise and assist ASX with its transition until 30 September, after which he intends to retire.

JonesTrading has appointed two new co-heads of prime services to replace current head of the division, Robert Sackett, who is departing for Mirae Asset Management.

Jorge Hendrickson has been appointed as co-head from Opus Fund Services, where he had been the firm’s chief revenue officer for almost 10 years. Alongside him, Mark McGoldrick joins from Cowen, where he most recently served as director of its outsourced trading and prime services group for almost seven years.

LCH’s head of equities, Alex Krunic, has left the clearing house after just over three years in the role. During his tenure at LCH, Krunic was responsible for driving EquityClear’s strategy and managing relationships with clearing members and trading venues.  

For LCH, while not a like-for-like replacement, some of Krunic’s responsibilities will fall to Ivan Gilmore, who was named head of cash equities for LCH, Ltd and SA at the end of last year.

Nordic asset manager DNB Asset Management has appointed Eivind Aukrust as its new head of index linked strategies. He joins from Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), where he spent the last six and a half years.

Aukrust’s most recent role as a portfolio manager at NBIM was his second stint with the firm after serving as a trader there for over six years from 2008-2014. In the interim, he founded Auka Capital and spent a year as a hedge fund manager.

Trading solutions provider Tourmaline Partners has made two key hires in London and Sydney, as part of its expansion of global trading experts. Gareth Pickard joins the firm as senior European equities and derivatives trader, based in London. Meanwhile, James Gleeson comes onboard as a managing director and will focus on business development as well as trading in the APAC region – based in Sydney. The pair bring over 25 years’ experience each to the firm, having previously served at BTIG and Vantage Capital Markets, respectively.

Christian Schalke, DWS Group’s director of equity trading for EMEA, has left the firm after just over 10 years, according to an update on his social media. Before joining DWS, Schalke spent almost 10 years at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in various roles. Later in his career, he spent two and a half years at Morgan Stanley in derivatives sales and nearly three years at MainFirst Bank as head of derivatives sales.

Elsewhere, European agency broker Kepler Cheuvreux has appointed Bobbie Port as its new head of electronic distribution. Port has been promoted to the position after serving at the firm for the last 11 years, most recently as deputy head of execution sales. Prior to that, Port held the position of senior execution sales for just over nine years.

Before joining Kepler, Port held the position of direct market access (DMA) and algo execution sales at Instinet Europe, and also served as senior sales associate and trade support, equities and fixed income at Nasdaq and BNP Paribas, respectively.

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Lofthouse joins a small but distinguished circle of female exchange CEOs in the trading space: including Julia Hoggett, who was appointed CEO of London Stock Exchange in December 2020 and Julie Becker of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, who took the helm in April 2021. Across the pond, the New York Stock Exchange also has strong female leadership – in 2018 it appointed Stacey Cunningham as its first female leader, and in December 2021 she was succeeded by the exchange’s current president, Lynn Martin, while Sharon Bowen became the NYSE chair.

Lofthouse currently serves as group executive markets for ASX, having initially joined the firm in 2015 as a member of its executive leadership team.

Speaking on Lofthouse’s appointment, ASX chairman, Damian Roche said: “Given the high calibre of experienced candidates attracted to the position, we are delighted that the outstanding choice to lead ASX as its new CEO comes from within the organisation. It is testament to Helen’s qualities and highlights the strength within ASX’s executive ranks.”

Lofthouse bring considerable experience in financial markets to the role, with over 20 years’ experience in cash equity and debt markets, listed and OTC derivatives, and clearing and settlement services.

Before joining ASX, she served as managing director at UBS for close to four years and prior to that, held various senior positions at JP Morgan, where she spent nearly 14 years.

Speaking on her appointment, Lofthouse said: “I am honoured and humbled to be chosen as the CEO of ASX given the critical role it plays in Australia’s financial markets.

“As a member of the senior executive leadership for almost seven years, I have strong working relationships with people and teams throughout the organisation. I am looking forward to helping shape ASX’s future as we continue our transformation and leverage our technology platform to deliver further value for customers, staff, shareholders and the investing public. I am also indebted to Dominic Stevens for ensuring ASX is in a strong financial, operational and technological position, and with considerable growth optionality when he leaves.”

Dominic Stevens will continue to serve as ASX’s CEO until 31 July 2022 and following Lofthouse’s promotion, he will continue to advise and assist ASX with its transition until 30 September, after which he intends to retire.

“Dominic has driven the execution of our strategy to build an exchange for the future. He has done a great deal to contemporise the organisation, improve the resilience and functionality of our operating platforms, position ASX to capitalise on new growth opportunities and lift the experience for our customers,” added Roche.

“Under Dominic’s leadership, ASX has become a stronger, more performance-driven company, which consistently delivers solid financial results.”

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The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) recently concluded its investigation into the November 2020 day-long equity exchange outage, caused by a software issue on the  refreshed ASX Trade system, which created inaccurate market data.  The technical issue coincided with the launch date for the upgraded ASX Trade system.

Following its investigation, ASIC imposed additional licence conditions on three licences held by ASX. The conditions are focused on mitigating risks for future tech upgrades, with specific emphasis on oversight of the CHESS Replacement Program, which is scheduled to go live in April 2023. ASX is upgrading its aging CHESS clearing and settlement system to Distributed Ledger Technology.

“The ASX outage was a very serious event, exacerbated by subsequent operational issues,” said  ASIC chair Joe Longo. “The imposition of these licence conditions will confirm that remedial actions are implemented appropriately and efficiently to address these operational issues – including for the critical rollout of the CHESS Replacement Program.”

ASIC’s report into the outage highlighted serious deficiencies in ASX’s and market participants’ ability to limit the outage’s impact on overall liquidity. Some of these deficiencies had already been highlighted in an earlier review by ASIC after a previous outage at ASX in 2016. “ASX and market participants must act to ensure that the market can function at all times, so that vital sources of capital are available to the economy,” said Longo.

ASX has agreed to address the recommendations of the independent expert report into the outage, which it expects to complete over the next 12 to 18 months. “We are pleased that ASIC’s investigation into the market outage is closed and that no breach of ASX’s licence conditions was found,” said Dominic Stevens, ASX managing director and CEO. “However, we will continue to invest to strengthen the quality of our infrastructure and reduce operational risk.”

Stevens said work to fulfil the new licence conditions is well underway, and that additional conditions would apply to its market and clearing and settlement licences.

“These new conditions relate to actions ASX is taking to strengthen its project governance and execution practices,” ASX said in a statement. In summary they involve: 

• addressing the independent expert recommendations following the market outage and appointing an independent expert to assess the remediation;
• appointing an independent expert to assess ASX’s assurance program for the implementation of the CHESS replacement program;
• while the program is ongoing, requiring attestations from senior executives and the Board about technology project readiness.

Where relevant, Stevens said ASX is applying lessons from the outage to its CHESS replacement and is strengthening the project by appointing an independent expert to assess the assurance program.

“I am proud of the work the team has done over the last five years to reduce outages and incidents across ASX by close to 90%,” he stated. “In addition, when the CHESS replacement goes live in April 2023, a significant upgrade program across all levels of our equities technology stack will be complete, with the average age of our technology dropping from over 13 years old to four years old.”

While no process can eliminate all possibility of technology incidents, Stevens said ASX’s continuous improvement programmes had contributed to a significant reduction in incidents over the last five years.

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The service – Synfini – uses the same technology as ASX’s flagship CHESS replacement, but is offered as a cloud service, allowing flexibility and scalability to ASX’s customers as their usage grows. It provides customers with access to ASX’s DLT infrastructure, data hosting, ledger services and support.

ASX said the DLT as a service ‘sandpit’ opened in January this year, with more than 20 firms ‘jumping in’ to explore the Daml smart contract language from Digital Asset for building multi-party applications.

Broadridge is one of the first adopters and is developing an application that automates and eliminates paper for off-market transfers in the equities market.

“It extracts and simplifies business processes to make data accessible and optimises workflows using smart contracts,” said Paul Stonham, general manager business development, ASX DLT Solutions.

“This eliminates the need for organisations to build, run and support their own environment, reducing cost, complexity and risk.”

ASX said each party has invite-only and permissioned access to a synchronised and real-time immutable audit trail, which improves the accuracy of information and workflows, thereby reducing delays and the need for additional manual reconciliation.

Automated consent management and sovereignty to data owners ensures each party sees only the data on the ledger that they have permission to access. The platform’s committer nodes sit across several data centres and leverage Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) technology, ensuring reliability and integrity for all parties in each workflow.

“It’s great to see customers, like the ASX, using our technology to build additional solutions beyond the original use case,” said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO at Digital Asset. “Synfini is a great opportunity for users to familiarise themselves with Daml, while getting new products and services to market faster in a DLT environment.”

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 and is still on-track for go-live in April 2023, its chairman said in a recent AGM address.

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