Results of Moscow Exchange Committee on Information and Technical Support Services meeting

The meeting of the Moscow Exchange Committee on Information and Technical Support Services which comprises representatives of member firms, software developers and information agencies, took place on 18 June.  The Committee's scope of functions includes issues related to the strategic development of the Exchange's technologies and the technical interaction between the Exchange and member firms. New regulations require also that the committee sets criteria against which trading is suspended in collaboration with the Exchange and provides an expert opinion on actions of the Exchange at outages.      

Members of the Committee discussed the operational reliability of the Exchange's technical infrastructure with representatives of the regulator and the Exchange. They considered incidents having drawn a wide response from brokers and their clients in recent weeks. Such incidents can be divided in two categories: situations in which recommendations to backup allow brokers to continue working as usual, and emergencies with trading halted: 

1. The majority of such incidents occurred in the brokers and their clients' site, were related to the market data transmission via FAST protocol. Members of the committee acknowledged that facilities employed by some brokers were not finalized to adopt current Exchange's backup techniques. They agreed with the proposal from the Exchange to carry out some more campaigns to inform brokers about opportunities for improving fault tolerance.   
2. The committee also considered the cause and outcomes of the emergency resulted in a halt of trading in derivatives on 15 June 2015, and accepted steps then undertaken by the Exchange as correct. They also agreed to elaborate criteria against which trading is halted and extend the scope of events to be announced to participants.   

In particular, representatives of the Exchange and members of the committee decided to review the procedure for prompt informing of participants.  The Exchange will notify participants also on standard technical changes such as switching to backup channels. This will require more information to be disclosed to participants than it does according to the current procedure.

Moscow Exchange reminds you that using mirrored connections to the market data flows is the standard practice worldwide to ensure reliability of critical connections. Connection schemes for mirrored flows of data recommended by the Exchange have been designed long ago and functioned well. They are used by the vast majority of participants and available on the Exchange's website.

For further information, please contact the Public Relations Department at (495) 363-3232.