CHESS Replacement

A secure & contemporary replacement system using global standards.
Offering a better way to deliver market efficiencies and innovation opportunities.

Building core and contemporary infrastructure to advance Australia's reputation as a leading economy

ASX is replacing CHESS, its well-functioning but ageing clearing and settlement system, with enhanced technology that will create new opportunities for the Australian market. When it goes live, the new system will offer richer functionality, adopt global standards and use contemporary technology.

It will also provide the option of accessing distributed ledger technology (DLT), which will deliver information more efficiently and stimulate competition by enabling anyone to build new services.

ASX has a history of innovating and upgrading systemically important systems. It is part of what we do. We believe this new system - sitting on new infrastructure - will create a foundation for the next decade and beyond.

Latest updates

On 30 November, ASX opened the first of the integrated Industry Test Environments (ITE1) for the cash equities clearing and settlement system being built to replace CHESS. This allows software providers to perform functional and non-functional testing to finalise development using the ITE1 environment. For further information on ITE1, release notes can be found here.

On 30 November, ASX published updates to technical documentation including the Accreditation guide, uplift for inflight and performance testing in the Guide to Testing Services and other documentation updates. Release notes providing full details can be found here.

On 25 November, ASX published Q&A generated from the Software Provider Readiness working group held on 17 November. The Q&A and presentation materials are available here.

On 17 November, ASX hosted a Software Provider Readiness working group, presentation materials are available here.

On 2 November, ASX published the Q&A generated from the Implementation & Transition working group which was held on 27 October 2021. The Q&A and presentation materials are available here.

An updated clearing and settlement system

ASX’s CHESS Replacement project will replace an existing, aged COBOL system, with a system built on Java and DAML – the Digital Asset Modelling Language – which has also been chosen by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) to standardise the OTC derivatives world.