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: The Role of Data Fabric and Data Mesh in Modern Trading Infrastructures

The demands on trading infrastructure are intensifying. Increasing data volumes, the necessity for real-time processing, and stringent regulatory requirements are exposing the limitations of legacy data architectures. In response, firms are re-evaluating their data strategies to improve agility, scalability, and governance. Two architectural models central to this conversation are Data Fabric and Data Mesh. This...

BLOG

smartTrade’s kACE Acquisition Signals the Next Phase of FX Derivatives Automation

smartTrade’s agreement to acquire kACE Financial from BGC Group underscores a decisive shift in institutional FX trading technology, as the market moves beyond connectivity-led platforms toward deeper pricing intelligence, derivatives automation, and converged front-office workflows. Under the terms of the transaction, kACE is valued at up to $119 million, comprising an initial $80 million payment...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Directory of MiFID II Electronic Trading Venues 2018

The inaugural edition of A-Team Group’s Directory of MiFID II Electronic Trading Venues 2018 offers a guide to the European landscape resulting from new market structure introduced by the January 3, 2018 implementation of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). The directory provides detailed profiles of more than 70 venue operators and their...