Tata Consultancy Services modernizes trade clearing

For more than 30 years, CHESS has supported the clearing and settlement of millions of trades and maintained records of share ownership across Australia. As transaction volumes increased and regulatory requirements evolved, ASX needed to modernize the platform without disrupting one of the country’s most critical pieces of market infrastructure.

In 2023, ASX selected TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure, along with Quartz Gateway, as the core solution for trade processing, clearing, and settlement. This solution would provide the foundation for a future-ready post-trade environment designed for resilience, scalability, automation, and operational visibility.

Given CHESS’s critical role in Australia’s financial system and the regulatory scrutiny surrounding the program, the transition required careful planning. To maintain operational continuity and market confidence, a staged implementation was adopted rather than moving to the new platform through a single cutover. Release 1 focused on replacing the cash equities clearing component, allowing ASX to modernize incrementally while continuing to support day-to-day market operations.

For CHESS Release 1, TCS deployed TCS BaNCS for Market Infrastructure alongside Quartz Gateway on AWS. Together, they support core clearing processes and provide standards-based connectivity for market participants.

TCS optimized and validated the platform’s performance to meet the demands of a critical market infrastructure workload, including throughput of more than 3,000 transactions per second.

“Our close collaboration with AWS helped us validate the platform architecture, optimize performance, and create a foundation capable of meeting the mission critical needs of Market Infrastructure Institutions on Cloud,” says R Vivekanand, president, BFSI Products and Platforms, TCS.

TCS also adopted Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to orchestrate its containerized workloads, standardize deployments, isolate workloads, and support automated recovery. Amazon CloudWatch provides real-time visibility into platform health.

With the platform architecture in place, TCS and ASX prepared for launch through rigorous performance testing, regression validation, cutover rehearsals, and coordinated stakeholder governance. This joint effort supported the smooth go-live of CHESS Release 1.

With TCS BaNCS and Quartz running on AWS, CHESS Release 1 processes trades approximately three times faster than the legacy architecture. The platform has demonstrated throughput of more than 3,000 trades per second, with capacity validated at up to 21 million trades per day.

A multi-region deployment architecture supports high availability and disaster recovery, helping maintain continuity for critical clearing operations.

TCS benchmarked the platform to support up to five times current market volumes, providing the capacity and flexibility to accommodate future growth, evolving business demands, and increasing transaction throughput. Automated monitoring and self-healing capabilities further reduce the need for manual operational support.

Together, these improvements give ASX a faster clearing platform that can support rising transaction volumes while maintaining the continuity required for critical market infrastructure.

Tim Whiteley, Chief Information Officer, Australian Securities Exchange, says, “With CHESS Release 1 now in production, we are proud to have worked with TCS to deliver a modern, secure, resilient, and scalable solution on AWS for the Australian market.”