NEW YORK — Nasdaq Inc. announced it has successfully completed the migration of the core trading system of Nasdaq GEMX, one of Nasdaq’s six options exchanges, to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new cloud-enabled market infrastructure, which uses AWS Outposts, delivers up to a 10% improvement in latency and the ability to more seamlessly adjust capacity in response to changing market conditions, ultimately delivering a better trading environment for market participants. GEMX processes 12 billion in daily messaging, 71% higher daily message volume than the MRX Options Exchange, which was migrated to AWS last year in December.
Nasdaq GEMX is Nasdaq’s third market to accomplish the move to AWS following Nasdaq MRX in 2022 and the Nasdaq Bond Exchange (NBE) earlier in 2023. Moving markets to the cloud requires the migration of an intricate web of processes, systems and native protocols that are used by multiple layers of the overall capital markets ecosystem. Nasdaq successfully handled enormous volumes of message traffic while managing a wide array of real-time market conditions, ensuring a seamless experience for market participants.
Nasdaq continues to lead in market modernization by delivering cloud-enabled infrastructure and building a more resilient, scalable and accessible financial ecosystem. To meet the rigorous performance, resilience, and regulatory demands for the capital markets, Nasdaq and AWS pioneered an edge computing system leveraging AWS Outposts, a fully managed solution which provides market operators and participants with added agility to rapidly adjust operational systems and strategies, as well as innovation capabilities, to keep pace with evolving industry dynamics.
Additionally, Nasdaq is investing in its primary data center in Carteret, NJ, Equinix’s NY11 International Business Exchange (IBX), which serves as the center of gravity for Nasdaq’s US markets, including its cloud infrastructure. As previously announced, Nasdaq is expanding the existing colocation facility to meet the growing demand of participants that seek proximity to the Nasdaq trading systems. The expanded and enhanced facility will provide the optimal environment for the next generation of compute workloads and offer clients access to a wider range of services and capabilities.
“At Nasdaq we take a client centric approach to the adoption and migration of advanced technologies to minimize risk and ensure clients can capitalize on the long-term benefits our modernization efforts deliver,” said Tal Cohen, Co-President, Nasdaq. “As a leading market operator and global provider of critical market infrastructure we are committed to continuing our journey to modernize the global financial ecosystem and unlocking the power of cloud technologies.”
“Together, our teams are continuing to help Nasdaq redefine the future of capital markets through close collaboration and use AWS capabilities to deliver measurable benefits for our mutual clients,” said Scott Mullins, managing director, Worldwide Financial Services at AWS. “We look forward to continuing to work alongside Nasdaq to achieve its long-term goals for operating a flexible yet scalable environment without compromising the performance of critical, ultra-low latency systems.”
Nasdaq has been systematic in its efforts to build the next generation of cloud infrastructure for its clients, a major aspect of that effort includes migrating existing Financial Technology solutions and developing new cloud-native platforms. As of November 2023, 106 financial institutions ranging from financial market infrastructures (FMIs), banks and broker-dealers have either deployed or migrated Nasdaq solutions to the cloud, including surveillance, risk management, marketplace services, and clearing solutions.
