Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx) has completed its planned upgrade of the capacity and technology of AMS/3, the Third Generation Automatic Order Matching and Execution System, and will introduce the upgraded system for securities market use on 28 January (Monday) this year following successful completion of market rehearsals.

From 28 January, the system will be capable of processing up to 5 million trades per day at its optimal performance level, compared with 1.5 million trades a day now.

In addition to AMS/3, an upgraded Market Data Feed system for the securities market, with capacity to support 5 million trades per day, will also be introduced on 28 January.

The launch dates for both upgraded systems were set after the successful completion of two rounds of market rehearsals in which a large majority of the Exchange Participants (EPs) and all information vendors participated.

HKEx’s market rehearsals provide EPs and information vendors with an opportunity to verify the readiness of their systems.  EPs are obliged to ensure the proper functioning and fitness of their order routing systems, trading systems, etc through different measures including in-house capacity tests.  Eleven of the 228 EPs operating Broker Supplied Systems chose not to participate in HKEx’s market rehearsals for the AMS/3 upgrade, but they confirmed their systems are able to cope with the new AMS/3 system capacity.

As a prudent measure, a two-week stabilisation period will begin with the rollout of the upgraded securities trading system.  During the stabilisation period, special fallback arrangements will be in place in the unlikely event that there is a critical incident that requires the fallback to the previous version of the AMS/3.

HKEx is in the process of increasing the capacity of CCASS/3, the Next Generation Central Clearing and Settlement System, into alignment with AMS/3 and expects to introduce the upgraded CCASS/3 in March this year.