A coalition of financial industry associations is pressing European stock exchanges to bolster their procedures for handling service disruptions, following several high-profile outages.
In a coordinated statement, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), the European Funds and Management Association (EFAMA), and the FIA European Principal Traders Association (FIA EPTA) say that exchanges must adopt clearer, more transparent rules to reduce confusion and market risk.
They propose four core principles for outage protocols: greater transparency on order status during outages, regular updates while systems are down, advance notification before re-opening and half an hour’s notice ahead of closing auctions.
The statement comes on the heels of numerous recent disruptions, including the Nasdaq Nordic & Baltic outage in July 2025, which saw volumes on OMX Stockholm 30 drop nearly 50%—from €2.3 billion to €1.6 billion—and the share of trading via closing auctions across OMX Nordic 40 fall from 16% to 7%.
The associations acknowledge that regulators and market participants have made strides—through initiatives like ESMA’s final report on market outages, the UK’s FCA policy on equity markets, and proposals from the Plato Partnership—but say that inconsistent protocol implementation remains a problem.
Their call to action is expected to reignite discussions on reinforcing market infrastructure and heighten pressure on exchanges to adopt more robust outage management practices.
