Feb 17, 2012
TSE takes action after recent malfunction
The
Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has laid out a series of measures designed to prevent
future outages following a glitch on 2 February that knocked out trading in 241
Japanese stocks for almost four hours.
By
the end of this month, the TSE said it will implement new rules and structures
for reporting cases that may affect business operations. The new procedures
will be enhanced with direct checks on trading systems by the bourse’s IT
services department, which will also station a TSE employee at its computer
centre in the early hours of the morning.
By
the end of March, the Japanese exchange will also develop operational drills from
improving recovery procedures, improve checks on the automatic switchover
processes following hardware failures and implement six measures for reporting
incidents.
Similar
checks will also be put in place for Tdex+, the TSE’s futures and options
trading system, ToSTNeT, the firm’s cash products off auction trading system
and other data systems by the end of April.
According
to the TSE, the 2 February outage happened because staff were “rooted
in overconfidence” after they failed to actively confirm the status of the
system.
“Normally, there should have been a structure in
place to enable constant monitoring and checking of said system's operation
status,” read the document. “However, the late night/early morning monitoring
structure was insufficient. With the rule stating that a system failure whose
effect on business operations is confirmed, should be reported to the
management, there were inadequacies in the system failure reporting structure.”
As a result of the 2 February glitch, TSE CEO
Atsushi Saito will take a 30% pay reduction for one month, while three other
executives have been docked 20% of pay for a month.
During the
outage, alternative trading venues SBI Japannext and Chi-X Japan were
prohibited from trading by self-regulatory organisation the Japan Securities Dealers Association (JSDA). However,
the TSE’s prospective merger partner, the Osaka Securities Exchange, was
allowed to continue trading.
SBI Japannext and Chi-X Japan met with JSDA representatives last week to discuss the matter.
A spokesperson for the JSDA
told theTRADEnews.com earlier this week that it “intends to re-examine its
policy for off-exchange trading suspension in the case of an exchange system
outage”.
Anish Puaar
+44 (0)20 7397 3817
anish.puaar@thetrade.ltd.uk