Assessment of ASX Clearing and Settlement Facilities – September 2025 1. Overview of Ratings, Recommendations and Areas of Supervisory Focus

The RBA’s assessment of the ASX CCPs and SSFs has been undertaken against the RBA’s Financial Stability Standards for Central Counterparties and Financial Stability Standards for Securities Settlement Facilities,¹ as well as the CS facilities’ more general obligation to do all other things necessary to reduce systemic risk. The RBA has conducted this assessment in accordance with its Approach to Supervising and Assessing Clearing and Settlement Facility Licensees.²

1.1 Ratings

The ratings for the current assessment period are set out in Table 1 below.

1.2 Recommendations

There are several recommendations arising from the assessment that the RBA requires ASX to prioritise:

• ASX should fully implement the plans to uplift resourcing and contingency arrangements for the existing CHESS system, including required upskilling of newly hired engineers and third-party support staff.
• ASX should ensure it has sufficient resources, assurance and reporting to effectively and meaningfully progress its risk transformation plan and risk culture initiatives.
• ASX should improve its model validation and control testing frameworks for financial risk models, in particular its data and reporting controls, to ensure that data processing, and the outputs generated, are of high quality.

Over the next year, the RBA will also be particularly focused on ASX’s governance, its approach to operational resilience across the CS facilities and progress against its cyber strategy.

Endnotes

For the current standards and further information about them, see RBA (2024), ‘Clearing and Settlement Facilities: Financial Stability Standards’. 1

See RBA (2023), ‘The Reserve Bank’s Approach to Supervising and Assessing Clearing and Settlement Facility Licensees’, 15 December. 2