In traditional exchange models, along with alternative finance exchange models, exchanges typically require downtime at set periods to ensure required actions such as sequence number resets, maintenance and software upgrades are implemented.

Now, exchanges running on Aquis Equinox can guarantee continuous operation, with no need for shutdown for software upgrades, infrastructure changes, capacity increases, reference data management or member onboarding.

Aquis Equinox combines this uninterrupted availability with the highest regulatory standards, alongside extreme fault tolerance and proprietary engineering. This ensures that the system can handle any kind of errors gracefully and automatically switch to a backup service (known as automated failover) in real time. This also means that instances where distributed computer systems are unable to identify the primary system components without human intervention (known as split-brain distributed computing issues) do not occur.

Run through a shared ecosystem capable of hosting multiple exchanges under a single matching engine, Aquis Equinox delivers commercial efficiencies to both existing and start-up exchanges, and substantially reduces the costs of in-house development and staffing. Cloud-native deployment can eliminate costs associated with traditional data centres, decrease disaster recovery environment size, reduce environment duplication, carbon emissions and energy consumption, and improve speed to market.

The product was developed in-house by the Group’s Aquis Technologies team, and is enabled by significant investment into its technology stack. Aquis Equinox has undergone rigorous testing and is now available as a cloud-native, hybrid or on-premise solution for customers.

Adrian Ip, Managing Director, Aquis Technologies, said:

"With the ability to run an exchange system without the need for shut-down, our ambition to offer "exchanges as a service" has now become a reality.

In the past, exchange technology providers have always been limited by the fact that different exchanges have different time zones and therefore varying hours of operation. What was traditionally a once per day shutdown to maintain the exchange now becomes redundant through Aquis Equinox.

Moreover, through a shared ecosystem in which downtime is not a requirement, Aquis’ matching engine enables the economies of scale to be shared across exchange platforms, delivering significant benefits to customers.

For too long, the traditional exchange technology provision industry has exported its entire business model to the world. Expensive software licenses, data centres, people and energy consumption. Stopping other industries which could benefit from regulated market grade technology. Aquis Equinox unlocks the potential of the next generation of capital markets for the world."

Aquis is well-recognised for unmatched performance in exchange services, with the Aquis Matching Engine offering the industry’s lowest latency. In addition, Aquis has been a true pioneer and market leader in full cloud-based exchange deployments since developing a cloud-native financial exchange alongside SGX and AWS in 2020.