ASX opens consultation on revised CHESS replacement implementation timetable

ASX today opened a consultation into a revised timetable for the replacement of its Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS).

As FinanceFeeds has reported, in March this year, ASX gave notice that the timetable was under review, but would wait until June to formally commence consultation. This allowed CHESS users to focus on their day-to-day operational activities amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It also enabled ASX to assess the impact of the pandemic, requests for changes, and the ability of all participants to commence the operational readiness phase of the project.

The revised timetable has been produced to provide additional time for the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all stakeholders, accommodate functionality changes requested by users, and have a longer period for ASX and CHESS users to complete their respective development and readiness activities.

All these considerations have resulted in a new go-live date of April 2022, 12 months beyond the original target go-live.

ASX explains that, since it announced the need to replan in March this year, significant progress has been made. For instance, the CHESS replacement application and the distributed ledger have been successfully deployed to several ASX technology environments across multiple data centres. Also, a seventh software drop has been deployed on schedule into the customer development environment (CDE), which represents 89% of the core clearing and settlement functionality used by customers. In addition, 34 organisations have connected to the CDE, including software providers, brokers and share registries.

The opening of the industry test environment, initially for back office software providers, is being prepared for commencement in December 2020.

Updated procedures and guidelines aligned to the replacement system have started to be published.

The consultation is open for four weeks with responses due by July 28, 2020.