{"id":591883,"date":"2026-04-07T19:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T19:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/591883\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T19:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T19:48:08","slug":"australias-biggest-stock-exchange-needs-tougher-competition-or-we-all-risk-paying-the-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/591883\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s biggest stock exchange needs tougher competition, or we all risk paying the price"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost every Australian has a stake in how well the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX<\/a>) works. Most working adults have superannuation savings invested in companies listed on the ASX, which together are valued at more than A$3 trillion<\/a>. <\/p>\n

If you\u2019re among the millions of members of big super funds AustralianSuper and UniSuper, those industry funds are some of the biggest investors<\/a> in the publicly listed ASX<\/a> itself. So you could also have a direct stake in the ASX too.<\/p>\n

Yet after a decade of costly technology failures, outages and embarrassing mix-ups<\/a>, an independent report<\/a> has just found the \u201cASX is at serious risk of falling further behind without a fundamental reset\u201d.<\/p>\n

Those damning findings come just weeks before the ASX is due to launch<\/a> a long-delayed replacement<\/a> for its antiquated trading technology. If that April 20 launch goes well, it could finally be a step in the right direction. <\/p>\n

But until the ASX comes under more pressure from competitors and its shareholders, it\u2019s hard to see that \u201cfundamental reset\u201d happening any time soon. Here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n

What the corporate watchdog found<\/p>\n

On Thursday, as Australians were packing up for their Easter holidays, corporate regulator the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) released the final findings<\/a> of a nine-month independent inquiry into the ASX. It didn\u2019t hold back.<\/p>\n

The report found<\/a> the ASX had \u201csystemic, long-standing and deeply embedded\u201d issues, with an \u201cinsular and defensive culture\u201d that put short-term profits ahead of fixing well-known problems.<\/p>\n

The report lists multiple examples. For instance, the ASX\u2019s systems struggled to cope<\/a> with record trades in March 2020<\/a>, as investors panicked about COVID-19, followed by a full-day market outage<\/a> late that year. <\/p>\n

There was another outage in December last year<\/a>. That came just months after an ASX mix-up<\/a> that briefly wiped $400 million off the market value of Australia\u2019s third biggest telco, TPG Telecom.<\/p>\n

The problems this report identifies are less about technology failures, and more about a culture of short-term fixes, at the expense of acting as long-term stewards of a stable financial system. <\/p>\n

Read more:
\n The ASX\u2019s rookie error is just the latest of many blunders. Investors are losing confidence<\/a><\/p>\n

The ASX\u2019s lack of competition<\/p>\n

If there was an easy alternative for companies wanting to list on the stock market in Australia, the ASX\u2019s issues would matter far less.<\/p>\n

However, the profit-driven ASX has close to a monopoly over Australia\u2019s stock market, managing 81.5% of turnover<\/a> as of end of December 2025. Its only competitor, Cboe Australia, manages the remaining one-fifth of Australian equities trading.<\/p>\n

This week, the Canadian-owned National Stock Exchange of Australia (NSX<\/a>) announced it wants to become a rival<\/a> to the ASX and Cboe Australia. <\/p>\n

More competition would be very welcome. Yet it\u2019s hard to see the ASX\u2019s dominance being challenged anytime soon. <\/p>\n

ASIC\u2019s report highlights just how unusual it is have so little competition in the absence of direct government control.<\/p>\n

In North America and much of Europe, the market is bigger, so there\u2019s more competition between stock exchanges<\/a>. The report found<\/a> this \u201ctends to lead to more competitive service quality\u201d. <\/p>\n

Across much of Asia, stock exchanges are more likely to be government owned or controlled, meaning \u201cpublic interest is often prominent in how they operate\u201d. Yet, as the report concluded<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Australia is different. ASX faces little competition and there is no major government ownership stake or board representation. It has, therefore, evolved with
\nfewer constraining influences on the way its market infrastructure is operated compared with other jurisdictions<\/p>\n

The report found the ASX has put delivering high shareholder returns<\/a> to its own ASX Limited shareholders ahead of investing in the technology and people needed to run a consistently reliable stock exchange.<\/p>\n

Beyond new tech, investors need to demand change<\/p>\n

Over the next two months, expect to see some big changes at the ASX.<\/p>\n

First, on April 20<\/a>, the ASX expects to begin launching its replacement \u201cclearing house<\/a>\u201d technology: the computer system used to manage transferring money and share ownership between buyers and sellers. <\/p>\n

Known as the \u201cClearing House Electronic Subregister System\u201d (CHESS<\/a>), if that launch goes well it could start to address the ASX\u2019s long-running technology problems.<\/p>\n

The ASX also needs to appoint a new chief executive officer by the end of May<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Ideally, that person would be an outsider, possibly coming from overseas, with experience from another stock exchange.<\/p>\n

Who that new CEO is matters. But what will matter even more is how much the ASX board gives the CEO real authority to carry out genuinely transformational change \u2013 not just more short-term fixes.<\/p>\n

Shareholders have a role to play here too. Key investors, like industry super funds AustralianSuper and UniSuper, have benefited from the ASX paying out high returns for many years. <\/p>\n

To protect their own members\u2019 returns in the long-run, those funds could make a real difference<\/a> by demanding the ASX finally act on this latest damning report into its culture \u2013 even if that means accepting slightly lower dividend payments from the ASX while it gets its house in order.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in all of our interests for Australia\u2019s major stock exchange to be able to cope well, especially in a crisis, without the \u201csystemic, long-standing and deeply embedded\u201d problems that have plagued the ASX for too long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost every Australian has a stake in how well the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) works. Most working adults…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-591883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}