Exchange playbooks on outage protocols

The EU financial market infrastructure is generally robust, stable and resilient. This reliability of trading systems is underpinned by the continuous investments of trading venues and market participants in their infrastructure, ensuring orderly trading, providing investors with the best possible service, and complying with the applicable regulatory requirements.

While trading venue outages are rare, they require an appropriate response. All FESE Members have procedures in place to do so. With the objective of a more harmonised framework in Europe that builds on the broad consensus in place, and to support market participants, FESE endorses the adoption of an industry-wide standard protocol to harmonise communication and outage procedures. The adoption of outage standard protocols would give the entire market and its participants the confidence, awareness and transparency needed in these exceptional, and incredibly rare, circumstances.

To contribute to this objective, FESE has agreed and published a set of principles for industry-wide standard protocols in equity, fixed income, and exchange-traded derivatives markets:

• The framework for standard protocols in equity markets
• The framework for standard protocols in fixed income markets
• The framework for standard protocols in ETD markets

Since the publication of the principles, FESE Members have been developing and publishing their playbooks on outage protocols. These playbooks act as a summary, focused primarily on incident communication, of relevant sections of the complete operational frameworks maintained by all exchanges.

The table below serves as a centralised database of all the available playbooks.