TSE under fire for poor communication after system crash

Oct 02, 2020 | News On Japan

Oct 02, 2020 (Nikkei) - The Tokyo Stock Exchange was the target of criticism Thursday for failing to disclose information and leaving retail investors in the dark after a system failure caused the bourse to shut down an entire day of trading for the first time.

The exchange first detected a hardware malfunction just after 7 a.m., and contacted brokerages at 8:01 a.m. to ask them to refrain from sending orders. But an overall trading halt was not announced to the broader public until about 8:39 a.m., and even then the news appeared only on the TSE website.

The exchange is slated to resume normal trading Friday, once the orders received during the disruption are reset. Had it tried to rush back into operation on the same day, "smooth and stable trading would have been impossible, so we thought it would be best to reopen trades tomorrow," Hiroki Kawai, TSE executive officer for equities, told a news conference.

But the exchange's handling of the situation may fuel criticism of its crisis management abilities, including from a government that seeks to boost Tokyo's stature as an international financial hub.

The TSE offered few details about the cause of the disruption at first beyond "problems with a system that distributes market information."

Providing even partial information would have let ordinary investors better judge when trading was likely to come back online. Yet exchange officials gave no concrete explanation to the public until the 4:30 p.m. news conference, on the grounds that reporting unclear information would be inappropriate.

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