EIE will take Aquis’ complete suite of exchange technology including the marketleading Aquis Matching Engine (AMS), its state-of-the-art Aquis Market Surveillance (AMS), as well as operations tools and assistance in the post trade environment.

EIE, which is aiming to become a Registered Investment Exchange, is the world’s first infrastructure trading platform to create a bridge between the billions of underinvested capital and the thousands of globally unfunded projects. EIE was launched in mid-2017 and works with national governments, local government, landowners, universities, and energy/transport companies to package and fund major development, regeneration and construction projects as bonds. The exchange matches these with professional investors, offering them the ability to buy and sell infrastructure bonds on a risk-adjusted basis. The projects on EIE will be available as liquid tradable debt and equity style instruments. This will ensure the project owners receive the capital at the best price and investors will receive a constant supply of opportunities so they can build a portfolio according to their risk appetite.

Aquis will supply EIE with a trading front end, its high speed, high capacity matching engine, a surveillance solution, including a first-line surveillance service, as well as market operations and post trade tools and services. Both the matching engine and the surveillance system will be hosted in the cloud. In Europe there is particular demand for compliance and surveillance systems as existing Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) rules and now MiFID II regulations mandate that trading firms of all types must have systems in place to monitor and analyse their order flow and transactions in order to detect actual, and attempted, market abuse and fulfil Best Execution criteria.

Commenting on the agreement, Magnus Almqvist, Head of Technology Sales, Aquis, said: “Uniquely, Aquis Technologies offers a full suite of products and services that are cost-effective, flexible and highly performant, which make it an ideal partner for a new exchange. We are very pleased that EIE has picked Aquis Technologies to help it launch such an innovative exchange. This signifies a step change in the type of services Aquis offers the financial industry.”

Mike Blakey, COO of EIE, added: “Having looked across the spectrum of potential suppliers, we felt that Aquis was the best fit for us in terms of our requirements for building an exchange from the bottom up. Their products are second to none and their own experience as a start up with the launch of the Aquis Exchange MTF in 2013, means they can give us much useful guidance and advice. Their flexibility will also support our development plans for 2018.”