April 2 (Reuters) – Australia’s corporate regulator on Thursday flagged governance weaknesses and risk management failures at the country’s market operator ASX in its final report following an independent inquiry.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s report follows several mistakes by the exchange operator over the last few years that frustrated market participants, as well as the regulator and the country’s central bank.
ASX processes most of Australia’s stock trades and runs all of its clearing and settlement services.
The report’s key findings were aligned with its interim conclusions, including that the bourse operator compromised resilience of critical market infrastructure to deliver high shareholder returns, ASIC said.
The panel also found that governance arrangements failed to “provide the necessary focus on critical market infrastructure” and ASX “lacks the aspiration to be a steward of critical market infrastructure.”
ASX’s risk management and compliance practices needed to mature and become more deeply embedded within business processes, the panel added.
“The further evidence and key observations in this Final Report support the scale of transformational change required at ASX to deliver on its stewardship of critical market infrastructure,” ASIC Chair Joe Longo said.
“This report confirms that ASIC’s decision to commission this unprecedented Inquiry was the right call.”
The regulator had in December imposed an additional capital charge of A$150 million on ASX in response to an inquiry launched in June.
Thursday’s report follows several mishaps over the last few years, including a series of technical glitches that resulted in a near full-day outage in the heightened trading volume of 2020, sparking an ASIC probe at the time.
The company’s ambitious, and ultimately disastrous, attempt to rebuild its clearing and settlement software platform with custom blockchain-like technology from 2017 also frustrated market participants – and ultimately ASIC and RBA.
ASX also had a series of operational issues, including a company name mix-up in August 2025 and an outage of its announcements platform in early December last year.
(Reporting by Rajasik Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas and Leroy Leo)
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