ASX’s new 24 hour, globally connected Customer Support Centre was opened by the Federal Treasurer, the Hon Joe Hockey, at a ceremony in Sydney today.
The Customer Support Centre provides end-to-end customer support. It brings together ASX’s technology, operations and market surveillance teams, and improves the ability of ASX to service customers in managing individual or market- wide events.
The Customer Support Centre is located alongside ASX’s Australian Liquidity Centre. ASX has invested $45 million in the combined facility so far.
The speech given by ASX’s Managing Director and CEO, Elmer Funke Kupper:
http://www.asx.com.au/documents/asx-news/OpeningofASXCustomerSupportCentreASXCEOSpeech.pdf
Facts and figures about ASX’s Customer Support and Australian Liquidity Centres (ALC):
- ALC opened in early 2012 and has become a diverse and comprehensive financial markets community.
- Over 100 customers and 200 cabinets are co-located in the ALC, and there are over 1,500 connections between ASX and customers, and more than 260 connections between customers. The accumulated bandwidth of all connections adds up to about three million megabits of information per second.
- ALC community is made up of broking firms (28%), proprietary trading firms (23%), network providers (15%), third- party service providers (11%), market makers (9%), managed service providers (7%) and others.
- Customers are drawn from Australia (68%), Asia Pacific (14%), US (12%), and Europe, Middle East and Africa (6%).
- ALC community is connected via ASX net global (an international network access service) to other financial hubs in Asia, North America and Europe.
- The facility has enough power to generate electricity for 5,000 homes. The uninterrupted power supply can run at full capacity for five days without needing to refuel.
- ALC contains 600 kilometres of cable, enough to stretch from Sydney to Albury.
- Latency speed to Singapore and back is 98 milliseconds, Chicago 183 milliseconds and London 259 milliseconds (about one-quarter of a second).
- ALC offers a level playing field. All connections between customer cabinets and the trading platforms are the same length, and all data services and speeds are available to all customers.
- Almost 70% of the activity in the multi-trillion dollar Australian equity and futures markets originates from electronic gateways in this building.