MEMX Postpones Launch Due to Coronavirus

The Members Exchange (MEMX) has delayed two of its key target dates—July 24, its launch date, and May 11, the start of platform testing—due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. Exact timing for the new launch remains undetermined, as the fledgling exchange awaits the lifting of shelter-in-place requirements, said CEO Jonathan Kellner in a statement on April 17. However, Kellner added he expects the go-live to be sometime in the third quarter of this year.

The exchange is planning to begin testing and member certification later this quarter, with exact dates coming soon. MEMX continues to hire additional staff, onboard firms, and work with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) toward the approval of its exchange application, Kellner said in the announcement.

The decision stands in contrast to what Tom Fay, MEMX’s COO, told WatersTechnology on March 17, which was that he was confident the launch date would not be held back despite initial market volatility caused by the coronavirus crisis. However, as the pandemic has proven to be increasingly disruptive to trading firms of all stripes, it forced the exchange to reevaluate. 

MEMX declined to provide additional information beyond what was in Kellner’s announcement.

Critical tech projects underway at the exchange include integrating the Nasdaq Market Surveillance Platform—formerly known as Nasdaq Smarts—which Nasdaq is moving to the cloud. As of last month, the pair was working on establishing connectivity and waiting on the delivery of the final hardware, which MEMX will host. 

MEMX is also building its matching engine internally, talking to cloud providers as it looks to deploy a multi-cloud strategy, and building a switching infrastructure with a smaller IT footprint than what is seen at the bigger, established exchanges. To meet that goal, MEMX partnered with Intel, using its Optane Memory offering, which is the seventh generation of Intel’s Core-series processors.

“We’re going to be able to run the entire exchange in a single rack of computers—what we call a hyper-converged infrastructure—and still maintain N+1, and in some cases N+2 redundancy through that entire stack,” Fay said in January.

By shrinking its IT footprint, MEMX hopes to achieve latency and jitter reductions while maintaining a stable environment.

It is unclear whether any of the exchange’s tech projects have also been delayed as a result of the pandemic.