History
Originally developed by Paritech for Commsec Australia in 2002 as an alternative to the predominant IRESS broker trading platform. Paritech went on to sell it to several other Australian brokerage firms who were looking for an alternative to IRESS (mainly for cost reasons). In 2012, a new low cost broker, OpenMarkets, was formed in Australia specialising in technology services based on the Plxtra platform. OpenMarkets was well received in Australia and quickly became the largest non-bank broker.
In 2014, Refinitiv (now a part of LSEG) adopted used Plxtra infrastructure to include real time depth, trades and shareholding information in their Eikon terminal for Australia and New Zealand. While Refinitiv already had this data, they did not have the capability to display users’ own orders - a vital feature they needed to compete with IRESS.
In 2019, Motif Markets acquired the Plxtra intellectual property from Paritech. It used this to supply an exchange platform to First Nations Stock Exchange and brokerage platform to Empower Hub - an API focused brokerage firm owned by Malacca Securities in Malaysia.
In 2025, Motif Markets decided to open source the Plxtra platform. As a small (software) engineering company without significant balance sheet or sales infrastructure it could no longer sell its platform as a closed source product. However it believed that there were opportunities arising for open source platforms.