Australia’s regulator, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), has published its annual assessment report of the ASX Group (ASX).
The report covered numerous criteria, including the sufficiency of ASX’s technological resources to properly operate their facilities, the operation and monitoring of the ASX 24 futures market, procedures for considering listing applications and ensuring compliance with the recently introduced capital-raising initiatives for small and mid-cap companies and the operation and supervision of ASX’s clearing and settlement facilities.
Whilst passing the regulator’s assessment, the report gave details of areas where ASX could undertake further efforts.
For example: the Australian Market Regulation Feed (AMRF) is a FIX protocol real-time interface providing information from Australia’s two market operators (ASX and Chi-X) on trading activities to enable ASIC to fulfil its market surveillance role as market regulator.
ASIC said that the AMRF projects by ASX should also focus on the processes of third-party vendors’ and vendor quality assurance practices when estimating the cost and duration of new projects.
With monitoring and enforcing compliance, ASX has been asked to make a number of changes including exploring improvements to its processes and procedures around the operation of the ASX 24 futures market, considering listing applications from emerging market issuers, detecting fraudulent or unauthorised company announcements and ensuring that small to mid-cap entities comply with newly introduced capital raising rules.
In its clearing and settlement activities, ASX will update internal processes to separately capture complaints it receives regarding the operation of the Trade Acceptance Service (TAS), which is the service it uses to provide clearing and settlement arrangements to Chi-X.