ASX prepares to switch new web portal live

The Australian Securities Exchange is preparing to relaunch its ASX Online portal, allowing traders to better leverage the new platforms it is implementing as part of a massive transformation effort.

The move is part of a broader $50 million, four-year technology transformation aimed at completely overhauling the ASX’s trading and post-trade platforms.

ASX CIO Tim Thurman told iTnews end users would be migrated over the coming weeks to a new customer-facing portal designed to better capitalise on its new back-end capabilities.

“We have two main websites – the ASX website and ASX Online, which is our customer-facing portal for customer services,” Thurman said.

“Eventually, we want to tie everything together with our core technology, using the enterprise services bus for standardisation.

“Clients can log on to ASX Online, and the whole idea is to make our data accessible to our customers, so it’s very customer-focused.”

The new Online site promises an optimised search experience, a homepage tailored to the individual, a personalised subscription feed, and a new channel to lodge and manage service queries, among other thing.

The site will integrate with the exchange's new Salesforce CRM, which is replacing the 14 legacy CRM systems the company is progressively decommissioning.

“We’re down to about seven now, including Salesforce,” Thurman said.

“We’re going to get rid of another four this year. The great thing is there’s a lot of pressure now to decommission the legacy CRMs,” Thurman said.

“What we want to move to is a single client view, so we rolled out Salesforce to everyone at the exchange in some form or another.”

Risk management migration phase three

The ASX is tackling the Online overhaul at the same time as it begins work on the next phase of its risk management platform migration.

Last year, the ASX chose NASDAQ's Sentinel Risk Manager as the underlying technology for its new risk management system.

The first component of the new risk management platform – default management – went live in September 2015, while the second – risk optimisation – went live in January.

Work on the third phase of the project, risk consolidation, is now underway.

“Requirements have been defined and now rubber hits the pavement,” Thurman said.

“We are currently in the design study phase. We’re not 100 percent sure of the overall complexity, but it will be delivered over the next 18 to 24 months. Teams have been engaged to commence work on this phase.

“There’s a lot more to it than taking out current clearing platforms and replacing them with a single platform. Right now we’re looking at four clearing systems that we’re going to decommission and move onto a new vendor-based service."