Warsaw Stock Exchange: First Year Of Operation Of UTP Trading System

• The first trading session in the new trading system, the Universal Trading Platform (UTP), took place a year ago on 15 April 2013.
• Implementation of UTP was the most important infrastructure project on the Polish capital market in many years.

Since 15 April 2013, Warsaw Stock Exchange operates based on a system which complies with the highest global standards and addresses the growing requirements of market participants while ensuring organisation of trading in line with the global trends. UTP developed by NYSE Technologies is known to international investors and brokers on the world’s biggest market: the same trading platform is used by the exchanges of the NYSE Euronext group in New York, Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Brussels, as well as many other exchange markets.

“The implementation of the state-of-the-art trading system was a great challenge for the Exchange, brokerage houses and many other institutions present on the Polish capital market. The first year of operation of UTP proved that we managed to complete the ground-breaking process without any interruption to the market. Moreover, we managed to maintain the highest efficiency of the system and thus focus our efforts on unlocking its business potential. Last year, trading in equities on WSE increased by 23%; the growth rate was nearly four times the European average. This year, session trading in March was 15% higher than in January. The results will be even better after the elimination of barriers imposed by the high cost of clearing which effectively limit the interest of the most active clients in the Polish market. However, I am certain that the coming years will bring dynamic growth of the market based on the tool which today is celebrating its first anniversary on WSE,” said Adam Maciejewski, President of the Management Board of Warsaw Stock Exchange.

UTP replaced Warset which operated on Warsaw Stock Exchange from 17 November 2000. The number of orders placed in the new trading system increased more than three-fold compared to the last year of operation of Warset and the average number of orders per session was close to 5 million.

Table Comparison of the first year of operation of UTP and the last year of operation of WARSET 

The implementation of the new trading system involved more than a hundred participants including WSE, 58 brokerage houses – Exchange Members, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF), the Central Securities Depository of Poland (KDPW), KDPW_CCP, BondSpot and several dozen data vendors.

The effective implementation of UTP enabled expansion of the derivatives market segment. New categories of instruments were added to WSE’s offer including futures contracts on WIBOR reference rates and futures contracts on Treasury bonds. Stock options are planned to be introduced into trading in 2014. In a longer term, the position of WSE in derivatives trading will be reinforced with the implementation of a separate trading system dedicated to derivative instruments: UTP-Derivatives or UTP-D.

More about WSE’s new system: http://www.gpw.pl/utp