What's Next for MATCHNow

In a recent note to customers, Bryan Blake, Vice President, Canadian Equities, detailed MATCHNow's 2021 strategic vision, including plans to migrate to Cboe technology, growth in conditional orders and more.

Just over six months ago, Cboe acquired MATCHNow to lead its expansion into Canada and build out a more complete North American equities business. In that time, we have made exceptional headway on integrating our teams and building a robust strategy for 2021 and beyond. I am especially happy to share that MATCHNow has found a great home within an organization that shares our history of innovation and customer-first approach to business. 

Beginning the MATCHNow Integration

Our integration project includes migrating the MATCHNow platform to Cboe technology and to Equinix's TR2 data center in Toronto, which we believe will make your trading experience more efficient and user-friendly. Cboe's best in breed technology will serve as the foundation for us to grow our products and services and introduce new trading functionality as we inject further competition into the Canadian marketplace.

MATCHNow’s migration to Cboe technology will lead to lower latency and overall better performance through a much more resilient platform. The technology integration also gives MATCHNow’s market participants the ability to trade Cboe’s diverse, multi-asset product suite, which includes U.S. and European equities, a wide array of ETP products, equity and index options, futures, and multi-asset volatility products, using a consistent order entry and market data protocol framework and a common toolset.

During our technology integration call on February 17, we announced our plans to enhance our conditionals offering in Canada with BIDS Trading technology and its distribution network in 2022. We believe bringing two industry leaders together will create an enhanced market center for block-sized liquidity that will uncover new block trading opportunities for buy-side and sell-side trade desks.

Growth in Conditional Orders

We know you rely on MATCHNow for exceptional price improvement, deep liquidity and functionality that all help to reduce market impact and execution costs, and we look forward to delivering the same top-notch services and products throughout 2021. We continue to lead the evolution of non-displayed liquidity in Canada with the growth of the MATCHNow Conditional Order Book, which assists our customers with a viable source of midpoint block liquidity. MATCHNow is also a reliable facility for broker-dealer internalization, which is especially important in this difficult-to-trade market. We greatly appreciate all of our subscribers and vendors who have integrated conditional orders within their algo suites and workflow. As a result of your continued partnership, MATCHNow set a Conditional Order Book record with over 4.8 million shares traded, double-counted on February 8, following impressive volume in January.

Continued Client Dialogue

Throughout 2020, our North American Equities team established itself as a leader in industry analysis through the use of data and empirical evidence. We plan to expand our data and analytics platform into Canada to provide our clients with the same statistical data points and other market structure-related information that has been so beneficial to our U.S. participants. We will continue to share with you timely market insights that help you trade most effectively in Canada.

Cboe’s North American Equities team is committed to listening to and engaging with the industry to learn more about Canada as we grow our partnerships in North America.

^{2021 Cboe Exchange, Inc. All rights reserved.}

^{The information in this letter is provided for general education and information purposes only. No statement(s) within this letter should be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell a security or to provide investment advice. Supporting documentation for any claims, comparisons, statistics or other technical data in this letter is available by contacting Cboe Global Markets at www.cboe.com/Contact.}