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 future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process, and extract value from market data, offering greater scalability, efficiency, and intelligence. This webinar,...

BLOG

DTCC Sees T+1 Prep Accelerate as BNP Paribas and J.P. Morgan Adopt CTM Workflow

As the UK and Europe advance towards their 2027 deadline for T+1 settlement, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has announced that BNP Paribas and J.P. Morgan have adopted its CTM automated tri-party matching workflow. The move is a significant indicator that large-scale preparations for the compressed settlement cycle are gathering pace, with firms...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit London

Now in its 2nd year, the AI in Capital Markets Summit returns with a focus on the practicalities of onboarding AI enterprise wide for business value creation. Whilst AI offers huge potential to revolutionise capital markets operations many are struggling to move beyond pilot phase to generate substantial value from AI.

GUIDE

The Data Management Implications of Solvency II

Bombarded by a barrage of incoming regulations, data managers in Europe are looking for the ‘golden copy’ of regulatory requirements: the compliance solution that will give them most bang for the buck in meeting the demands of the rest of the regulations they are faced with. Solvency II may come close as this ‘golden regulation’:...