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

Recorded Webinar: Data platform modernisation: Best practice approaches for unifying data, real time data and automated processing

Financial institutions are evolving their data platform modernisation programmes, moving beyond data-for-cloud capabilities and increasingly towards artificial intelligence-readiness. This has shifted the data management focus in the direction of data unification, real-time delivery and automated governance. The drivers of this transition are improved operational efficiency as manual processes are replaced by faster, more accurate automated...

BLOG

WFE Signals Extended Trading Hours Feasible, but Warns Settlement Systems Must Catch Up

The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) has published new research concluding that extended trading hours, including near round-the-clock markets, are technologically feasible, but their long-term sustainability depends on coordinated reform across clearing, settlement and payment infrastructure. In Extending Exchange Trading Hours, the WFE examines proposals from major U.S. exchanges to expand equity trading toward 22-...

EVENT

TEST Event page 1

Now in its 15th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and 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 Handbook 2026

AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...