ASX in talks over resolution of ASIC investigation of Nov outage
The Chairman and the Managing Director and CEO at ASX Limited gave addresses at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Exchange held earlier today.
The topics of the speeches included the reliability and resilience of ASX’s operations, hence, the issues relate to the outage that occurred on November 16, 2020 were also discussed. The outage occurred shortly after a major upgrade to ASX’s equity trading platform, ASX Trade, called the ASX Trade Refresh project.
ASX Chairman Damian Roche said that the Exchange continues to have dialogue with ASIC about a resolution to its investigation of the outage.
“ASX is a heavily scrutinised organisation. That is appropriate given the importance of our role. We take a constructive approach and are open to new ways to strengthen the quality of how we operate our business. ASX has a culture of continuous improvement,” Mr Roche said.
In consultation with the regulators ASX appointed IBM Australia Limited to undertake an independent expert review. The purpose of the independent expert review was to examine the project and assess whether it met internationally recognised standards or frameworks and relevant securities industry practices.
The independent expert identified several key shortcomings in the project including:
- factors that suggested the ASX Trade system was not ready to go-live considering ASX’s near zero appetite for service disruption. This was the case even though the formal implementation readiness processes were completed and verified by multiple parties without objection to go-live
- there were gaps in the rigour applied to the project delivery risk and issue management process expected for a project of this nature, and
- risk and issue management, project compliance to ASX practices, project requirements and the project test strategy/planning did not meet accepted industry practices. It was not reasonable to expect the test plan used would meet the ASX’s near zero appetite for service disruption.
The independent expert made recommendations in seven key categories: risk, governance, delivery, requirements, vendor management, testing and incident management.