New lease of life for Johannesburg Stock Exchange

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) celebrates the start of a new era for its equity market yesterday with the launch of equity trading platform Millennium Exchange ÓVerdana developed by technology solutions provider MillenniumIT. The day also marks the moving of the platform from London, where the trading engine has been situated for 10 years, to the JSE building in Johannesburg. These changes are aimed at enhancing operational efficiencies for market participants, who are expected to benefit from executing transactions almost 400 times faster than the present trading solution.

The platform is housed within the JSE's recently completed new state of the art data centre based on Tier 3 specifications and is designed to ensure 99.98 percent availability.

The seamless migration from the previous TradElect platform follows Borsa Italiana's identical switch last week. As with the JSE, this move was successful and followed extensive testing and consultation with stakeholders. Leanne Parsons, Director of the JSE's Equity Market, said: "As we have seen with the Borsa Italiana migration last week and similar migrations during the past year, the new platform provides exceptional levels of performance, functionality and capacity. The JSE's move to the new equity system, which we have nicknamed Project Jaya meaning 'victory' in the language of Sri Lanka, is a victory for the market.