The Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) has successfully gone live with Nasdaq Matching Engine and Nasdaq Market Surveillance, enabling it to introduce new products and services, and attract investors.
“In order to give confidence to a market, you need a stable platform,” said Marlene Street Forrest, Managing Director of the Jamaica Stock Exchange. “You need a stable platform with respect to trading, but you also need a platform that will provide the level of surveillance that the markets and listed companies will feel comfortable with to [ensure] trading is properly done.”
In launching the new matching engine from Nasdaq, Jamaica Stock Exchange has taken yet another step in adopting innovative market infrastructure technology. The matching engine technology, which is built upon the cloud-enabled Nasdaq Financial Framework, will bolster JSE’s ability to manage a range of trading functions – from price formation to order matching – while enabling scalability, flexibility and efficiency. Nasdaq Market Surveillance, meanwhile, is designed to detect market abuse across multiple data sources, which ultimately helps uphold market integrity.
Street Forrest believes that the stability of the new platform will encourage more secondary market activities in JSE-listed companies. She also noted that the exchange plans to introduce more products and services to the market, including short selling, trading on margin and options trading – all of which are expected to be implemented in 2020 using Nasdaq Technology, with short selling coming in the first quarter.
“We believe that we now have a stable, reliable platform. Based on its reliability, we feel our resources can be otherwise deployed to build out these products and services,” said Street Forrest.
She continued, “And there are some discussions that we are having in terms of not only the products but also other markets.”
Located on the waterfront of the Kingston Harbour, JSE was the world’s best-performing stock market in 2018, according to Bloomberg. The main index in 2018 rose 29% in U.S. dollar figures, and over the past five years, Jamaican stocks soared by more than 300%, Bloomberg reported.
The Managing Director has ambitions to grow JSE further, and the deal with Nasdaq fits in with the Exchange’s five-year strategic plan, in which the JSE “must interact with at least 10 markets around the world,” according to Street Forrest.
“There are no boundaries that are beyond the JSE, as the organization continues to explore the use of technology that Nasdaq provides to ensure that our shareholders’ value is maximized and the confidence of the market remains high,” said Street Forrest. “This partnership with Nasdaq is another step to keep pace with the world’s financial markets.”
“The Jamaica Stock Exchange has been at the forefront of modernizing the Caribbean region’s financial markets,” said Carlos Patino, Head of Latin America and the Caribbean for Market Technology at Nasdaq. “By leveraging our trading and surveillance solutions, JSE will be operating on the world’s most widely-used trading technology for exchanges. This is a key indicator of their dedication to building Jamaica’s capital markets ecosystem into an important hub for finance and commerce.”
Source:
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jamaica-stock-exchange-leverages-nasdaq-technology-to-amplify-its-offerings-2020-01-21
