Successful Expansion of CONNEXOR

The manual processing and dissemination of reference data is highly complex, error-prone and slow. Over the past decade, CONNEXOR has solved these challenges for the Swiss market and has now started to bring the twin benefits of increased efficiency and scalability to Asia as well. This achievement marks a milestone in the geographic expansion of CONNEXOR and brings automation and standardization benefits to the structured products industry in the Asia-Pacific market.

Providing Data of the Highest Quality Standards
CONNEXOR is a unique reference data platform that seamlessly connects data sources such as issuers of financial products with data recipients such as exchanges, banks, CSDs, data vendors or even newspapers

By rationalising the process of data dissemination and paving the way for greater connectivity through enhanced automation and straight through processing (STP) rates, CONNEXOR enables the efficient management of financial products along their full lifecycle – including product events. The collection and maintenance of product data is centralized and standardized, simplifying the overall workflow and reducing the number of interfaces.

André Buck, Global Head Sales at The Swiss Stock Exchange comments: “Thanks to CONNEXOR, what used to take days is now a matter of hours or even less. Reference data requests can be fulfilled much faster and the fail-rate of rejected products is almost eliminated. This helps to reduce business risk and enable more efficient use of capital. Our goal is to offer an ever increasing number of market participants around the world a chance to enjoy the efficiency gains that our unique service has already provided consistently to the Swiss marketplace.”

The geographic expansion of CONNEXOR is in line with the mandate of SIX to provide financial market participants with innovative, value-adding services. It supports the Swiss banking community active in Asia as well as international market participants by fulfilling their need for data efficiency. This allows shareholders and clients of SIX to leverage their established set-ups in local markets outside of Europe and in return benefit from synergies and scale.

Significant Growth Potential Beyond Structured Products
Moving forward, CONNEXOR is targeting further international growth in terms of markets, users, use-cases and applications as well as financial instruments. The Swiss Stock Exchange is currently in dialogue with many more market participants, and CONNEXOR has already started to expand beyond structured products to encompass fixed income, Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) and even Life-Insurance policies.

A 10 Year Success Story
CONNEXOR has seen tremendous growth since its inception in 2009, with more than one million newly issued structured products flowing onto the platform each year, corresponding to around 5,000 new product submissions on a daily basis. In 2019 CONNEXOR supported the sourcing and distribution of around 15 million product updates, representing approximately 50,000 fully automated lifecycle events every day. Moreover, the platform fully supports regulatory requirements such as PRIIPs/KIDs, MiFID II, IRS 871m along with Switzerland’s incoming Financial Services Act.

CONNEXOR first demonstrated its global potential in 2017 when the SIX entered into a strategic partnership with Contineo, a leading  multi-issuer platform for structured products in Asia based in Hong Kong. Contineo was launched in January 2015 and is an industry-supported, open network for private banks and wealth management firms to access issuers of structured products.

SIX Wins Award for ‘Best Structured Products and Derivatives Exchange’
The Swiss Stock Exchange proud winner at the prestigious SRP Europe 2020 awards in London.

CONNEXOR: A unique reference data platform