Market development

Ultimately, a trading exchange needs to win the hearts and minds of people facilitating capital raising and people wishing to trade on secondary markets. This was easy when governments issued a franchise to an organisation to run a financial trading exchange and their markets were protected by both government regulations and provincial trading habits.

Nowadays winning hearts and minds is no longer that easy. Governments are looking to competition to provide value for money; technology has given investors and traders a worldly outlook. Also, the large exchanges with established markets have now become public companies and are constantly looking for other opportunities to grow revenue using their existing infrastructure and reputation.

To be successful, a new exchange venture needs to demonstrate to its nascent exchange community that it has the ability to raise the exchange’s profile and attract more companies and people to the community. In other words - growth.

Even national exchanges need to be evolving. Competition for listings is now international and investors/traders are no longer limiting their buying to local exchanges. Releasing new features can be even more challenging for existing large exchanges as they not only need to implement the features in their infrastructure, they also require their connected organisations (participants, terminal and data providers, settlement and registry companies etc) to update their systems as well.

Market development is the key to growth. Adding innovative new features and capabilities to a market signals dynanicism and vibrancy. Inevitably, this raises the profile of the exchange which, in turn, attracts companies and people to its community.