The Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) has successfully gone live with Nasdaq Matching Engine and Nasdaq Market Surveillance, thereby enabling the exchange to introduce new products and services, and attract investors.

The matching engine technology, which is built upon the cloud-enabled Nasdaq Financial Framework, will bolster the JSE’s ability to manage a range of trading functions from price formation to order matching while enabling scalability, flexibility, and efficiency.

Nasdaq Market Surveillance is designed to detect market abuse across multiple data sources, which ultimately helps uphold market integrity. In welcoming the new technology, JSE Managing Director, Marlene Street Forrest believes that the stability of the new platform will encourage more secondary market activities by JSE listed companies.

She points out that, “the JSE plans to introduce more products and services to the market, including short selling, trading on margin and options trading — all of which are expected to be implemented in 2020 using the Nasdaq Technology, with short selling coming in the first quarter. We believe that we now have a stable, reliable platform. Based on its reliability, we feel our resources can be otherwise deployed to build out these products and services.”

She notes that there are ongoing discussions that the JSE is having in terms of not only the products but also other markets. “To give confidence to a market, you need a stable platform. You need a stable platform for trading, but you also need a platform that will provide the level of surveillance that the markets and listed companies will feel comfortable with to ensure trading is properly done,” the JSE boss explained.

According to Street Forrest, “as the organisation continues to explore the use of technology, Nasdaq provides our shareholders’ value is maximised, and the confidence of the market remains high.”

“The JSE has been at the forefront of modernising the Caribbean region’s financial markets,” said Carlos Patino, head of Latin America and the Caribbean for Market Technology at Nasdaq. He explains that “by leveraging our trading and surveillance solutions, the JSE will be operating on the world’s most widely-used trading technology for exchanges. This is a key indicator of their dedication to building Jamaica’s capital markets ecosystem into an important hub for finance and commerce.”

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business-observer/local-stock-exchange-now-live-on-nasdaq_185262