Industry Calls on Exchanges to Improve Outage Management

Leading financial industry associations, including the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), the European Funds and Management Association (EFAMA), and the FIA European Principal Traders Association (FIA EPTA), are urging European exchanges to enhance their outage management protocols. This follows a series of disruptive trading outages since 2020 that have undermined equity market stability.

While acknowledging the inevitability of outages in an increasingly electronic and automated trading environment, the associations emphasize the need for robust, transparent, and consistently applied procedures to minimize their impact. Regulatory progress, such as the ESMA Final Report on Market Outages and the FCA Policy Statement on Improving Equity Secondary Markets, has set clear standards. Exchanges must now align with these frameworks to ensure market resilience.