About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Aquis Introduces World’s First 24×7 Regulated Market-Grade Exchange Matching Engine

Subscribe to our newsletter

Aquis Technologies, a division of Aquis Exchange PLC, has announced the launch of Aquis Equinox, the world’s first regulated market-grade 24×7 matching engine that eliminates the need for shutdown or downtime. Traditional exchange models and alternative finance exchange models often require downtime for tasks such as sequence number resets, maintenance, and software upgrades.

Aquis Equinox guarantees continuous operation, with exchanges running on the platform not requiring shutdowns for software upgrades, infrastructure changes, capacity increases, reference data management, or member onboarding. According to the company, the platform combines uninterrupted availability with the highest regulatory standards, extreme fault tolerance, and proprietary engineering. This ensures that the system can handle errors and automatically switch to a backup service (automated failover) in real time, without human intervention.

Commenting on the launch, Adrian Ip, Managing Director at Aquis Technologies, said: “With the ability to run an exchange system without the need for shutdown, 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.”

Aquis Equinox runs on a shared ecosystem capable of hosting multiple exchanges under a single matching engine, delivering commercial efficiencies to both existing and start-up exchanges and significantly reducing 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.

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

“For too long, the traditional exchange technology provision industry has exported its entire business model to the world,” commented Ip. “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.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

17 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline...

BLOG

Exegy and BMLL Expand Partnership to Streamline Access to Historical and Real-Time OPRA Options Data

Exegy and BMLL Technologies have expanded their partnership to deliver a unified OPRA options data solution, integrating real-time and historical datasets to support front-office trading and research functions. The collaboration builds on an agreement established in Q3 2023 and is aimed at addressing the data engineering challenges posed by the scale and complexity of OPRA...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...