Good morning, and welcome to ASX's financial results briefing for the six-month period ending December 31, 2021. Thank you for taking part in this virtual presentation. I hope you're all safe and well from wherever you are joining us. My name's Dominic Stevens, Managing Director and CEO of ASX. Presenting with me is ASX's CFO, Gillian Larkins. To begin, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm speaking on the land of the Gadigal people. I pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Before I get into our financial results, as many of you will be already aware, today I announce that I'm beginning the process of retiring from my role as CEO of ASX. I'm now in my ninth year at ASX and my sixth as CEO, having been a non-executive director for three years before that.
The last six years in particular have been a tremendous journey of transformation for ASX and the team. I'm incredibly proud of what we've accomplished for our customers, our staff, our shareholders, and our industry. When discussing the future and the best time to transition, the chairman and I agreed that after the completion of CHESS replacement, ASX will be in a tremendous position to leverage the significant foundational work put in place. This new phase for the company, which would take us to the back end of this decade, would not be something I could commit to, so it was important to begin the transition soon, such that a new CEO is able to be brought up to speed as these projects completed.
This will enable ASX to hit the ground running as it enters its next strategic phase in 2023 under new leadership and with long-term commitment. The work the team has done and the investment the company has made have put ASX in the best position to maintain its place as a top 10 global exchange, and the pre-eminent financial market intermediary in Australia. It's been a privilege to serve as CEO, and I'm extremely proud of the company's achievements. ASX is in a strong financial and operating position. With the transformation of critical systems, platforms, and infrastructure complete or nearing completion, the company's optimally placed to go from strength to strength. In the meantime, I remain fully committed to the role and will continue to lead the company and support our customers and other stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition to the new executive leader.
With that, I'll now take you through our FY 2022 half-year results, beginning with an overview of the results and the market and operational drivers over the last six months. Gill will then take you through the financial detail. I'll then return with an update on our strategic progress, comments around outlook, provide a brief summary, and then take questions. Let's begin with the financials on Slide 4. In the first half of FY 2022, ASX delivered a strong result. Our revenue increased by AUD 30.9 million to AUD 501.4 million, a healthy increase of 6.6%. This is particularly pleasing as our largest individual business area, Futures, posted lower revenues due to the ongoing effects of the Reserve Bank policy settings we discussed at the FY 2021 full-year results.
In addition, our listings business, which capitalizes and amortizes IPO and secondary fees, had an extremely strong half, receiving AUD 31.4 million more in cash fees than we recognized in our P&L. This result underlines the benefits of our diversified business model and its ability to deliver consistent results overall through different cycles. Our growth not only reflects a strong performance in listings, but also our securities and payments and our technology and data businesses. This was offset by a small drop in markets revenues, where the lower futures revenues I referred to earlier were balanced by growth in our cash equity market business. Total expenses were up AUD 11.6 million over the period to AUD 163 million, an increase of 7.6%, reflecting continued investment in initiatives coupled with growth in market activity. Gill will address this in detail later in the presentation.
This leaves our EBIT 6% higher at AUD 338.4 million. This was an increase of AUD 19.3 million and was a record EBIT performance for a half. The RBA's policy settings also continued to impact our interest income. While net interest income was actually up on the prior half, it was lower than the prior corresponding period due to the fact that rates and margins were still falling from higher levels in the PCP. With interest rates close to zero and average margins earned on collateral balances stabilizing at lower levels, interest income dropped 19% or by AUD 5 million to AUD 21.7 million versus PCP. This sees our NPAT higher by 3.5% at AUD 250.3 million. EPS also increased 3.5% to AUD 1.293 per share.
ASX maintains its policy of paying out 90% of underlying earnings, which means the interim dividend for first half 2022 will be AUD 1.164 per share, fully franked, also up 3.5%. I'll now turn to the key drivers of our results in this half. First half 2022 saw the busy conditions of FY 2021 continue to support strong revenue growth across the company, except for the two areas directly impacted by recent monetary policy settings. I'll address those in a moment. Equity markets remained buoyant, leading to strong demand for trading, clearing, and settlement services. Listings was particularly strong this half, and demand for data and technical services has continued to maintain pleasing rates of growth.
This is evidenced on Slide 5 by the light blue line in the chart, which shows the consistent healthy growth of parts of our business that were not impacted. Since the early days of the pandemic and the introduction of a zero-interest rate policy, including yield curve control, trading volumes of bank bill and three-year bond futures have fallen, and the returns on our own cash and participant collateral have also reduced. Encouragingly, the trading in short-term futures and the interest income line have stabilized and have risen a touch in the last 6 months. This can be seen by the darker blue and the gray lines in the chart. Even more important is the significant change in the local and global outlook for monetary policy. Across the world, there's been material changes in expectation for short-term interest rates due to increases in both headline and underlying inflation rates.
Markets are beginning to expect a normalization of interest rates, as evidenced by significant trading in contracts pricing the level of short-term rates in future years. If these market predictions eventuate, we expect the trading volume of short-term rates contracts to increase, and our interest income line to recover somewhat. Over the last six months, we've also seen bill futures volumes increase by 73%, albeit off a low base, reflecting depressed trading levels in the PCP. Slide 7 shows the changing nature of the futures business over the last few years, strong growth in long-term rate futures versus the slowdown in short-term rate futures. In the last year, there was a bottoming out of this slowdown as we see signs of more volatility in the short end of the curve.
After a very strong growth over the past 4 halves, 10-year futures volumes have pulled back somewhat, reflecting lower bond issuance and the risk-off nature of the market over the last 6 months. However, in the medium term, the trading volume trend is clear, particularly given longer term trends in fixed income issuance. Our electricity derivatives business continued to grow with a further 14% increase over the PCP. As can be seen on the chart, this business has increased from less than 5% of our revenue to now over 10% and is growing at a 5-year CAGR of over 15%. We see a bright future for this business as electricity derivatives are playing an important role in supporting the transition to renewable energy and decarbonization more broadly.
The standout performer for the last half, driven by strong demand for equity capital market transactions, was the record capital raised in the listings market. Total capital raised was circa 50% higher than any other half in the last decade. Even larger than the recapitalization of the market post the GFC. The number of IPOs was the second highest on record, beaten only by the boom in late 2007. While total capital raise was up 74% on PCP, our IPO and secondary listing revenue was only up 14%, and this reflects the accounting methodology to amortize IPO and secondary listing fees over 3-5 years, which came into effect in FY 2019. Importantly, while we recognize AUD 46.2 million of amortized revenue for the half, the business received cash fees of AUD 77.6 million, the majority of which will be recognized in future periods.
This gives us confidence about the consistency and quantum of earnings into the future. The equity market overall continued to exhibit high volumes during the past six months, with ASX on-market daily value growing close to 6% on the PCP. Volumes in the half were second only to the record 2H 2020 period when the beginning of the pandemic caused extreme volatility. Institutional trading value grew by almost 10% over the PCP, while retail volumes continued to be strong. Market volatility during the first part of the pandemic caused volumes in the lit market to pick up significantly, with more price discovery happening intra-day. This effect has unwound somewhat over the last 12 months, with auction activity growing 19% over PCP. Volumes have continued to be strong into calendar 2022.
These volumes flowed onto our clearing and settlement businesses, with higher cleared volumes and greater usage of our broad range of sub-register services, coupled with lower rebate levels, all leading to higher revenues. While Austraclear saw solid issuance, turnover was a touch lower, exhibiting a similar trend to the quieter bond futures market. These results also include the impact from our investment in Sympli, our property e-settlement joint venture with InfoTrack. Finally, our technology and data business achieved a pleasing increase in revenue. On the data side, there was a consistent growth across almost all parts of the business, leading to more than 12.9% increase on the PCP. Growth was also strong in technical services, with demand from new participants establishing their operations and increased demand from existing players.
Over the last six months, we have expanded our ALC's floor space and the number of cabinets available to customers. About 30% of this new space was snapped up immediately, and we have a pipeline we're working with to fill the remaining space. Bringing in new customers and expanding existing footprints have a leveraged effect within the technical services business. There are 139 customers in the ALC. This expands out into the use of 369 cabinets, accessing over 1,200 service connections, both ASX and non-ASX services hosted by ASX. We also have 104 customers connected through ASX Net communications infrastructure, where they access a further 466 service feeds. The most interesting part of this business is the growth in customer-to-customer connections since the ALC was put into service.
The chart on slide 10 shows the significant growth in these connections at the ALC, and also through customers who connect via ASX Net, our communications network. These connectivity benefits create operational efficiencies for our customers. As a final point on business drivers, I want to address the current challenging operating environment. Over the last 6-9 months, the business environment has been adversely affected by the Delta lockdown and then the Omicron wave. At the same time, there's been a significant pickup in demand for skilled employees in technology, risk, and compliance, leading to challenges in delivering BAU services and project execution.
There is limited inward movement from offshore to ease these pressures, and the Omicron wave has resulted in more employee sick leave and isolation days. ASX is prudently navigating this environment with a primary focus on protecting the health and safety of staff and customers, and maintaining our critical market operations. We keep a close watch on developments and remain flexible so to adapt to the changing circumstances. Notwithstanding this, ASX has continued to deliver a range of initiatives, and I'm pleased to note the significant achievements of the team over the last six months. Not only have we reorganized our operating model, but we have opened the CHESS industry test environment. We've provided electronic statements for CHESS issuers, launched Synfini, our DLT as a service offering, quoted our first crypto-based ETF, and we're working through our programs to address regulatory recommendations.
In conclusion, in addition to a solid financial half, ASX has delivered operationally in a difficult environment. With that, I'll then now hand over to Gill, who will take you through the financial. Over to you, Gill.
Thanks, Dom, and good morning. The ASX result for the first half of 2022 is notable for the heightened capital market activity seen in both our listings and issuer services offerings. Despite the continuation of the low yield environment introduced through the course of the second half of 2020, it was pleasing to see elevated cash equities trading from the prior comparative period and an increase in total ASX on market value traded, which both assisted our markets and our securities and payments business results for first half 2022. Turning to the financials and starting with the top line, revenue for the half is up 6.6% from first half 2021, with capital market activity being the largest contributor, followed closely by equities trading and higher demand for ASX's technology and data offering.
First half 2022 saw total expenses for the group increase by 7.6%, with staff costs the largest contributor due to wage growth and the inclusion of restructure costs from the new operating model installed at the start of the 2022 financial year. The impact was lessened by the lower depreciation and amortization charge for the half due to the roll-off of fully amortized technology systems. Moving through the table, the interest income line shows an 18.9% decline from the previous half, as expected. This fall was largely through decreased earnings rates. However, the stronger revenue from capital markets and tech offerings in the half more than offset the interest income decline and led to an increase in both underlying and statutory profit after tax by 3.5%.
This translated into the same increase in EPS, with the board declaring a dividend of AUD 1.164 per share for the half. Now to the individual performance of our business lines. ASX undertook an operating model review in early 2021 and introduced a structure at the start of this financial year that better aligns business responsibilities and enhances our focus on customers. ASX now has four businesses, Listings, Markets, Technology and Data, and our Securities and Payments business, with all comparatives restated as of first half 2022. Further information on the restatement is disclosed in the 18th of November market announcement last year, which is also on our website. This slide shows the 6.6% overall ASX revenue increase that's composed of Listings increasing by 17% as a result of higher annual fee income, elevated new listings and strong secondary raisings.
Markets decreasing by 2.6%, reflecting subdued futures volumes partly offset by higher cash market trading activity. Solid demand for our technology and data products secured a 10.1% increase on the prior half, with the higher cash market trading activity predominantly supporting the 6.9% revenue increase in the securities and payments business. Looking at this in more detail. Over half of the revenue made in the listings business for first half 2022 is through the annual fee income that we charge issuers based on their market capitalization as of May 2021. Higher overall market capitalization at this stage than in the prior years, coupled with a strong number of new company listings, contributed to a 22.3% increase in annual listings revenue for first half 2022.
As already highlighted, the number of new listings increased by 76.5% to 150, with the total number of listings increasing by 4.5% to 2,299 entities. Initial capital raised increased by 67% from first half 2021 to AUD 29.7 billion, with secondary capital raisings increasing by 77.3% to AUD 60.6 billion, both of which assisted the strong cash inflow for the half. The requirement to amortize initial capital raisings over five years and secondary capital raisings over three years results in the strong listings activity being less noticeable at the revenue line. On the following slide, you can see the amortized first half 2022 contributions in the dark blue box to the right of the chart and the profile of the expected revenue bookings for the next few halves.
Moving now to the markets business. Our markets business has seen a notable decline in futures volumes since the end of March 2020, when we entered the current period of low interest rates. Futures volumes are down 8.2% from first half 2021 due to the material decline in 3- and 10-year bonds, partially offset by notable growth in 90-day bank bills amid speculation about inflationary pressures and timing of RBA policy changes. The impact of this on the revenue line is not as severe due to the continued strong growth in the higher margin electricity futures business, which has a higher average fee versus the lower fee for interest rates futures. As we shift closer to interest rate rises, the expected volatility should assist our futures income in the medium term. Equity options revenue decreased by 3.6% from first half 2021.
Equity options volumes continue to decline, with single stock options volume down 1.8% on the same period last year and index options down 9.4% due to a fall in institutional activity linked to lower market volatility. The 8.1% growth in cash market trading over the last half has been underpinned by the reasonably strong daily average turnover, particularly in the second quarter, with growth seen in our premium products, that being 18.9% in options and 15.7% in Centre Point, leading to higher margins overall. Information services saw a strong half, with growth across the product suite, including increased market data usage, increased audit fee revenue, and price increases effective in second half 2021, which flowed into this half's financial results. All of this activity contributed to a 12.9% increase for first half 2022.
Technical services also increased, with revenue coming in 6.3% more than last half. The business saw an increase in demand for cabinets by 7%, as well as a pickup in demand for ASX service connections and feeds by clients. Finally, moving on to our fourth business, Securities and Payments. Through the operating model redesign, the previously named clearing and settlement business changed its name to Securities and Payments. It now includes both the Austraclear business and our share in the performance of the Sympli Joint Venture. This half saw the strong level of corporate actions activity give an immediate benefit to issuer services revenues by 9.6%. This was through both the higher trading activity and the primary market facilitation fees growth, in line with the increased initial and secondary listings.
Equity post-trade services saw an increase in both cash market clearing and settlement revenue, contributing to an overall 13.6% rise, reflecting the increase of 5.3% in on-market value cleared, increase in message volume, and less rebates owed this half by just over AUD 6 million. Austraclear, excluding Sympli, saw higher registry activity, with revenue coming in 1% more than last year and in line with second half 2021. The overall average collateral balance did decline from AUD 27.9 billion to AUD 14.3 billion as a direct consequence of the changes in RBA monetary policy and the resultant excess liquidity, which lowered demand for our service. This led to lower ASX collateral fee revenue, much in line with second half 2021.
The overall Austraclear business now accommodates ASX's investment in Sympli, whereby you can see the overall decline in this business line of 11.3% is mainly attributable to the increased share of operating losses of this joint venture by AUD 3.8 million versus last year. Turning now to total expenses. Total expenses for first half 2022 was 7.6% higher than first half 2021. The expense uplift was mainly through the 13% increase related to employees over the last half in response to the operating model redesign, annual salary increases, heightened recruitment, and additional staff working on our project and regulatory initiatives. Expenses also grew due to costs associated with ASX's technology upgrade, including cybersecurity and our digital initiatives, with equipment costs coming in at 12.2% more.
Administration was flat due to lower travel and marketing costs with the COVID restrictions, which absorbed an increase in consulting for projects such as our electronic CHESS eStatements initiative. With the heightened market activity continuing into first half 2022, the expenses attached to the increased transaction volumes were higher, coming in on the variable cost line 16.8% more than first half 2021. However, only 8% more than second half 2021, with the revenue attached to this activity more than absorbing the expense. ASIC has currently guided ASX to an estimated supervision levy lower than previous halves, which will be confirmed in the second half, with the depreciation and amortization line remaining fairly constant with first half 2021, leading to an overall increase in total expenses of 7.6% for first half 2022.
Since 2017, ASX has invested to strengthen our technology, risk, and governance foundations to build an exchange for the future. The left-hand side of the slide reflects the full year growth composition over the last 5 years. Over the last 18 months in particular, we have bolstered teams and updated our governance models where needed in the aftermath of the ASX trade outage and recent operating model and regulator reviews. This has contributed to the growth profile to date, with these initiatives continuing over the next 6 months. This, coupled with the rising wage inflation for experienced technology risk and compliance staff in particular, means we are now expecting the expense guidance to be in the range of 7%-8% for FY 2022, an increase of 1% from prior guidance.
On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see ASX has invested AUD 54 million in capital expenditure during the period, compared to AUD 54.5 million in the PCP. This is inclusive of our CHESS replacement project, as well as various initiatives to strengthen the resilience of ASX's services. Our guidance to market on our CapEx spend for FY 2022 is still AUD 105 million-AUD 115 million. Net interest income dropped 18.9% to AUD 21.7 million for the half through portfolio returns declining as maturing investments were replaced with lower yielding investments.
Investment spread income booked in the net interest on collateral balances line is down due to the average investment spread being 10 bps compared to 15 bps in the prior period. Of note, collateral balances are also down by 7.2%, leading to lower interest earned on the average balance. ASX's balance sheet is strong and positioned conservatively with very little difference in the underlying components between halves. We currently have an S&P long-term rating of AA- and hold a nominal amount of debt for working capital reasons. As you can see in the table, there has been an increase in the value of our total investments by circa AUD 5 million for this half, mainly through the additional investment in Sympli at the start of this half.
ASX has benefited from strong capital markets and increased trading activity and solid customer demand for technology data across the last six months. This softened the increase in expenses and the lower investment spread income, leading to positive earnings growth for this half overall. Underlying profit after tax increased by 3.5%, also leading to an underlying EPS increase of the same amount. The board has determined a first half 2022 fully franked dividend of AUD 1.164 per share, representing an increase of 3.5% on first half 2021. The dividend can be fully funded from retained earnings and represents a payout ratio of 90% of underlying NPAT, in line with our dividend policy guidance.
Amid continuing mixed external conditions, ASX is maintaining its strategy to strengthen the foundations of our business while investing in both core and adjacent growth opportunities for the future. With that, I will hand back to Dom. Thank you.
Thank you, Gillian. I'd like to spend a little time now on what has been achieved by the execution of our technology and business strategy over the past five years and what this means for ASX over the medium term. In setting our strategy back in 2016, we knew we needed a pathway that enabled ASX to embrace the accelerating changes in technology and digitization. It was clear that this was the overriding business theme on which to focus. Embarking on a transformational strategy is never easy to execute, and putting ourselves at the forefront of technological change would mean a significant multi-year body of work. However, this repositioning would enable Australia's financial markets to reap the benefits of world-leading flexible technology and was the right strategic path to take. This led us to implement a program with three technology-focused goals.
We needed to transform our technology to put ASX on a contemporary platform that would enable Australia's financial markets to develop and prosper over the next decade. This would also reduce the chance of a competitor being able to leapfrog ASX with disruptive technology. Secondly, we needed to increase the resilience of our technology and our operations, not because they were failing, but because of the heightened focus on operational resilience, rising cyber threats, and importantly, to better support our customers. Finally, in addition to upgrading our existing technology and operating platform, we would focus on finding fresh ways to leverage new technology and our significant skill base to create opportunities to grow and expand into the future. These goals were ambitious. The transformation of legacy technology while maintaining existing service levels around the clock is an extremely difficult undertaking.
Considering the first of our goals, I'm proud of the significant progress we've made. Technology transformation is about reducing technology debt, the digitization of processes, and transforming the core foundational systems and hardware that underpin the offering, not just updating a thin external layer. The transformation we've brought comes into sharp focus when we look at the renewal in our equity and enterprise technology infrastructure. Given the high profile of our CHESS replacement project, it's understandable the breadth of our overall program, which you can see on the chart on slide 25, is overlooked. We have replaced data centers, communications networks, trading systems, risk systems, websites, and more. Importantly, the average age of our infrastructure is moving to less than five years old, as much of it will have been replaced over this period. This transformation program is moving towards completion.
Over the last half, we've seen further progress across three of these work streams in particular. We've made available electronic statement capability to enable retail customers to access a web portal for their CHESS eStatements. For our new equity data warehouse, we've opened a customer testing environment and will begin a parallel run with the market in coming months. CHESS replacement remains on track for go live, and the industry test environment is open to software vendors, with customers joining in the coming months. The system uses Daml smart contracts, VMware's DLT platform, and connects to other ASX infrastructure that underpins the new system. It is meeting its availability and stability targets, and the team has plenty of work ahead as we now transition to the industry readiness stage.
Our new CHESS system will be at the leading edge of globally, and with a DLT system capable of managing a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem with millions of trades and billions of value turning over every day. It also means ASX's clearing and settlement systems are fully contemporary using global standard ISO 20022 messaging and operate on modern hardware across multiple data centers with improved security. As for our second goal of resilience, I'll not spend too much time on this as we've talked about our improved performance before. However, in looking back over the last six years, we're particularly proud of the reduction in incidents and outages across our key systems and platforms. This is a direct result of the investment in people, new software, and new hardware.
As you can see, incidents have been falling for 5 years and are down 85% over the period. If you look at the last 3 years, we've had just 1 severity one incident. Over the preceding 3 years, we had 5. Even more telling is going back a further 3 years before our transformation commenced, where we saw 12 severity one incidents. ASX continues to invest to enhance the resilience of our offering, and we're currently working on improving the excellence around software delivery. However, with a circa 90% reduction in many of our metrics, further significant improvements will be harder to come by. Thirdly, while we've had a busy program transforming the existing technology base, ASX has also been exploring opportunities to leverage our strengths and new technology base in adjacent areas.
There are a number of examples where we have increased our technology focus, and I'll cover off four today. The first is how ASX targeted technology listings and equity capital markets related to technology. Over the last six years, ASX has gone from an underweight position in technology listings to being globally competitive. This not only enables the listing of domestic technology companies, but also attracts listings from offshore. Consistent with our view on the growing importance of technology into the future, it's imperative that ASX and Australia maintain a healthy listed market for technology companies. I see ASX's listing offering ETFs and our technology indices working with unlisted capital and VC capital to create a globally competitive ecosystem to support this critical sector of the Australian economy.
In addition to stimulating the local technology economy, the growth of this ecosystem has enabled accounting, legal, banking, advice, listings, and auditing skills to also prosper. Ensuring this business is not lost to northern hemisphere capital markets generates significant benefit to our country. Another example I'd like to call out is our investment in distributed ledger technology, often referred to as blockchain. There are many differing views about public blockchains, cryptocurrencies, DeFi, NFTs, et cetera. However, there seems little argument that blockchain technology will be one of the most important technologies in financial services over the next 10 years. ASX saw this early and has been working towards enabling the benefits of this technology in its new clearing and settlement system.
We see significant value in permissioned distributed ledgers, allowing stakeholders to enjoy real-time immutable synchronization of their industry and the ability to further enhance the benefits of this synchronization by writing smart contracts out of these ledgers. In addition, we're also offering this enterprise-grade technology to the market for a broad array of uses. Synfini, our DLT as a service platform, went live late last year with a number of companies looking to leverage the benefits, first among them KPMG with its building assurance solution or trustworthy index for the New South Wales government. While it's still early stages, ASX is at the global forefront of utilizing this technology for permissioned enterprise-grade solutions. A third area where we believed back in 2016 was gonna grow and be important to ASX was big data science, and AI.
Given we operate in an industry that creates a tsunami of data, we believe this is a core skill set for the organization. In addition to investing in people, we developed ASX DataSphere, which enables access to raw data, a data science platform, and data science tools in a secure and governed ecosystem. Our use of this technology is growing internally for our own purposes and also for managing regulatory data requests. We're also beginning to see products built on the platform, providing key insights into fixed income markets for our customers. Over the medium term, we're confident that these capabilities will be an important part of our exchange infrastructure. Finally, another adjacency we've been pursuing is the opportunity created by the move from paper-based to electronic-based settlement of property transactions or e-settlement. This is our Sympli Joint Venture.
To give you an idea of the size of the opportunity, compare it with the electronic settlement of the fixed income market and the equity market that ASX currently manages. In revenue terms, the e-settlement opportunity in property is 14 times the size of the bond settlements revenue, and 3-4 times the size of the equity settlements revenue. In property e-settlements, ASX is the challenger rather than the incumbent. However, we're now connected to all the major banks, registries, and state revenue offices. We've also seen state governments, the ACCC, the Australian Banking Association, and the Australian Institute of Conveyancers, and the Law Council of Australia all agree to interoperability as a model for the industry. Last month, it was confirmed legislation will be introduced into the New South Wales Parliament shortly. Governments, regulators, and the industry are spending time and money building momentum to enable interoperability.
with a more contemporary technology platform and the ability to learn from the shortcomings of the incumbent offering, we see an opportunity to grow this business. It's clear the market now better understands why we saw tremendous value in this business area. Reflecting the changes in our focus, as Gill noted earlier, we've also recently reviewed our operating model. These changes better align the businesses and improve accountability and bring operations and technology closer. Two further changes, which reflect some of what I've said today, are the dedicated focus on our customers and the standalone technology and data business line. We have a customer center of excellence tasked with enhancing the end-to-end service across our lines of business to our individual customers. This is an area where we feel we can add more value by gaining a better cross-product view of how customers use our services.
Moreover, the technology and data area is now in its own discrete business, separated from the equity trading business. With an expanding data center footprint, a DLT platform, and a big data platform in place, we're exploring the growth opportunities in this area. To summarize the last five years, ASX has delivered a significant transformation in its technology, evidenced by the decommissioning of a number of old technologies and the reduction of average age of its tech stack. ASX has delivered a significant increase in operational technology resilience, evidenced by a dramatic reduction in incidents and outages across our platforms. ASX has put technology at the forefront of our focus to create future opportunities, shown by the number of technology-related initiatives delivered or close to delivery. How does this set ASX up for 2023 and beyond?
ASX is a strong business that provides critical market infrastructure across a number of financial market areas. As such, it's important that ASX reinvests in its business and maintains a contemporary infrastructure with leading-edge technology to ensure we meet the increasing expectation of our many stakeholders. This multi-year transformation makes ASX a stronger, more contemporary business with reduced technology debt and improved operational and technical resilience. This also lessens the probability of ASX being disintermediated by the technology of others. It also enables a whole new world of product development and service enhancement. Customers who may have been reluctant to build on legacy technology will be more comfortable building on the new DLT platform, our new hardware, and using global messaging standards.
The technology transformation, resilience, and focus has put ASX in the best place to maintain our strong market position, with optionality to build our portfolio in new, interesting, and sustainable ways into the future, while we work to enhance our customer focus. Finally, with all that, moving now to outlook. The second half of FY 2022 is actually off to a strong start. In what is typically a quiet time of the year, January has been a standout month. This has been aided by the activity in Block Afterpay and the BHP unification. Compared to the prior January, on-market trading value in our equity business increased by 45%, IPO capital raised was many multiples larger, secondary capital raise was up 70%, clearing value was up 40%, and futures were up 1%. More broadly, markets are currently at a critical point.
There is increased uncertainty and concern around the future political, geopolitical, and economic outlook, and the prospect of an election in Australia sometime this half. Importantly, we're seeing the problem of inflation in many countries for the first time in about 30 years. I cannot predict what will happen. However, in the last six months, inflation has gone from a transitory issue to one that many people are worried about. It's sobering to think that the last time inflation in the U.S. was at these levels, 10-year bond rates in the U.S. were closer to 8%. For ASX, these uncertainties lead us to think that the equity market will continue to exhibit volatility and volume, supporting a number of our business areas.
In addition, for the first time in a few years, moves in the short end of the rates curve are a possibility, which may support our futures business, as well as improve the returns on our capital and collateral balances. After a record-breaking calendar 2021, the IPO market may take a breather over the course of 2022, notwithstanding that there's still a reasonable pipeline of business. Like many, we anticipate the operating environment to remain challenging as we continue to navigate COVID-19. Against this backdrop, we've seen a marginal increase to our expense guidance, while our CapEx guidance remains unchanged. With that, I'd like to move to Q&A, where Gill and I can answer your questions. With that, I'll hand back over to the moderator. Thank you.
Thank you. Your first question comes from Andy Chuk from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Dom and Gill. Thank you for the opportunity. The first question's for Dom. I just wanna clarify the comment around your intention to retire this year. Is that referring to this calendar year or this financial year?
It's calendar year. Basically what this is is effectively getting out there, giving people ample notice. The board begins a process now, and I'm here, I'm committed, and you know, however long that takes, I'll be here working away until we have the next CEO to take my place.
Fantastic. The next question is around electronic CHESS eStatements. Can you just provide some color around the EBIT impact it would have over time, given that you've actually launched it now?
I think you said CHESS eStatements. Yes. That is a service that's been launched now. I think what always has been the issue with CHESS eStatements is more about the fact that we don't have the emails of all the investors, 'cause they're actually held by the brokers. That project will take a while to sort of ramp up as actually the brokers and the end customers are giving permissioning the emails to be sent to us for us then to actually play that out. I don't see anything in the near term changes on that. We are actually talking to issuers around a new model for charging for that.
I think that will play out over the course of probably more like 2023. Gill, do you have a
No, I think we really are waiting to see the pickup, and then we'll be able to model actually what the impact will be, and that will be in 2023.
Yeah. Thank you.
Great. Just one last one. On the product development front, can you just talk us through any new futures contract types that you might be working on? In particular, are there any in the green energy space?
Yeah, there's some interesting things there. The first thing is, as you may know, we are, you know, one of the people who are pitching for the government. As far as the market for ACCUs or Australian Carbon Credit Units, I think that process goes into RFP sort of imminently, so that's something that we're thinking about. We're also, as you know from last year, we worked on the five-year bond futures contract. That sort of got off to a very strong start.
With the volatility in the bond market and sort of, I think the sort of like differing views of where the market would be with the RBA and investors that sort of like slowed down over the course of the year, probably as did the three-year and ten-year bond futures. We've got some incentives to market makers come back there, and we're starting to see some volume back in that contract.
They're sort of the two things that are sort of front and center in the futures world. The other thing I actually would say also is that if you look at, I think we might have said it in the notes, if you look at the electricity business, that's actually grown quite significantly, and I think that's a longer-term trend, and it's starting to become, as you can see, more material for ASX. If it continues on at its growth, given its current size, it can become quite a bit more meaningful over the next five years.
Fantastic. That's all from me. Thank you, guys.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Ed Henning from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi, Ed.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, Dom, congratulations and all the best for the future.
Thank you.
Just following on from the last question on the CHESS eStatements that you send out, just so we can get a better understanding of it, how much money do you actually make from mailing out CHESS eStatements?
Well, it's in
Maybe I'll hand back to you, Gill.
Yeah. If you look at the issue of service assignments in there, but we don't specify exactly how much.
There's a whole range.
It'd be helpful to get some kind of something around it, just because, you know, while it'll take time, if it does move the lease statements, you've got to imagine that line falls, but we just don't know by how much.
Yeah. Ed, I think what we're doing is we're, you know, we've obviously announced our POC, and we've still got a process to go through over the next three months. We have done business cases on this, and what we really need to see is, you know, you could really do that many times. What we really need to see is the take-up by the brokers on this to really sort of validate what that number is. What I can give you assurance about is it will be on a tiered subscription basis, which means that you don't have to fear that the income will run away straight away.
It will be progressive. Certainly, when we are on top of that, we will be explaining that to the market.
There's a whole bunch of things in that line of various services we charge to issuers, and they tend to bounce around a lot. Actually, I think for issuers, keeping track of that is actually harder. In the conversations that we're having with them, I think what we're trying to do is actually make it a lot easier for them and have sort of a more all-in subscription service that provides all the services. Then, actually that gives them more certainty and I guess ASX more certainty as well around where we're at each year on that.
That's something, as Gill says, we're probably coming in more into 2023, and then we'll play out over time as actually, there's more take-up of the electronic service.
We will be in a position at the full year, Ed.
Yeah. I think at the full year, we'll give you more information on that. That's sort of. You know, it really is in the next few months ahead of us.
Okay. No, that's good.
Thank you.
Next question, just on the D&A outlook, obviously down this period with some roll-off of some technology, but then you've got CHESS coming on next year. Should we anticipate the pick up from that? How should we think about the outlook for D&A in 2023 and beyond?
Yeah. Certainly we have talked about this in the past, that D&A will certainly go up in 2024. However, not by sort of a back of the envelope calculation on what has been said in the market, how much this is costing divided by 10 years, because of course, there are other systems that are still coming off, and we've talked about this before, Ed. Look, it will increase in 2024, not necessarily 2023, 'cause it'll only have 2 months. It'll only be May and June of that year. It will in 2024, and once again, we'll be able to do that when we get closer to the time about that outlook, because we do have to look at all the other projects that we have lined up.
You know, other projects are going live in that time that will have an amortization profile. Also, the older ones will be coming off.
Okay. The next question, if you go to slide 7 and you talk about the fall off in the short rate futures, is there anything that can stop or has changed in the market where there's less participants that could stop that short-term line heading back up to its, you know, historical average, if you do get volatility back in the market?
It's a good question. Look, I think the effect here is the effect of, you know, if you think about it, what are futures contracts for? They're for hedging and speculation. If you've got a policy that says actually rates are going to be 0.1 and they're gonna stay 0.1 for the foreseeable future, that massively reduces the amount of hedging people want to do because they think, "Well, I don't need to hedge it 'cause it's assured," and, you know, the speculators will move to something else because actually they know that that's not moving.
Now, I think the really interesting thing, and we had a bit of a hint of it maybe the last time we spoke at this event, but certainly over the last six months, you know, I think monetary policy in the world has sort of like come to life again, and even more recently in this country in people talking about that that is something that's going to be moving again. There's gonna be speculation about it. I think it's really interesting what's going on in the world at the moment around inflation, and how that plays out over the next year or two. Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball, but what I would say is if you thought maybe a year ago, could monetary policy just be dead for the next five years?
I think my gut feel is that that mean has probably changed around to it looks like there's gonna be some interesting times ahead. You know, and maybe that's not in the very short term, but certainly I would say it feels to me like it's closer than it was the last time we spoke at this meeting.
Okay. That's good. Look, I'll leave it there and might circle back. Thank you.
Cool.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Nigel Pittaway from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi, Nigel.
Well, good morning, Dom and Gill. First question is on interest income. I mean, obviously you said that interest income will recover somewhat if interest rates rise. I was just wondering if we get a bit more color about how you're thinking about the leverage of your earnings to interest rates at the current time, given, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part, you can't invest beyond twelve months.
Yeah, maybe I could start or.
Yeah, why don't you?
Okay. Why don't you?
You can both answer that one.
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
Nigel, I think there's two things there. There's sort of like a one that's quite easy to understand, and that's sort of like effectively our net capital. You know, if rates go up 1%, and there's sort of a little bit north of AUD 1 billion of net capital, you can sort of very easily model the effect of that. The second one is a little bit more subtle because what it is is sort of like the margin on short-term securities, reverse repos, all of those things, and that has actually been, you know, crunched in because there's so much excess cash in the system, a lot of money left overnight in the ESA accounts, which means that actually it's hard to earn in the short end.
As that unwinds, that actually may lead to higher returns on those sorts of assets. That's, you know, being earned on the, you know, I think it's AUD 11.8 billion at the half. It's that piece of the number. You've got sort of two effects running there. I think we're sort of down at sort of like very little margin and very little outright interest rate on both of those numbers. I think it's sort of the optionality is very much the other way in that those could rise over time rather than fall any further than where they are. Did that make sense, Nigel?
It does. I mean, it sounds like there's a bit of a lag impact if interest rates go up. It takes a while for that to flow through. Is that the right way to think about it?
A little bit. Probably not too much. I think the average investment would probably be, you know, it would be less than three months. I think the lag probably is more like, you know, it's only a few months lag. If rates went up tomorrow, you know, we would probably have money invested out across the curve, and that would sort of roll off over a few months and get reinvested over a few months at higher levels, if that helps.
Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thank you. Second question is on the sort of commodity stroke electricity futures. You're obviously showing that they have grown as a proportion, and I think you said there is the chance they can become more meaningful moving forward. But given you are expecting a recovery in the interest rate futures, how meaningful do you think those sort of electricity futures will be in a sort of fully recovered interest rate futures environment?
Well, I might start off.
Yeah, you start.
I'll start off. I think what we mean by meaningful is that the number that we're printing for that business alone is actually becoming a larger number. You know, we're at the point, and I think we've said this before, Nigel, of disclosure. Not quite there yet, but very, very close. So that's what we mean by meaningful, and that it's becoming a meaningful business in its own right. You raise a very good question. In proportion to futures, it would absolutely be the timing of what goes on in the market versus actually the size of that commodity piece. I'll hand over to Dom.
I think maybe, Nigel, if you look at the net income in futures, and then you say if electricity is X% of that, you get a bit of an idea that that's now starting to become a meaningful number. If you say, you know, electricity sort of you know the growth in that market, sort of like north of 15% for the last 5 years, if you actually take that out another 5 years, that then starts to become a more meaningful number. It's sort of, it's now not just growth on a small number, it's growth on a meaningful number, which can get you to an interesting outcome.
I think there's a real sort of tailwind behind that with what's going on in the world around renewable energy and decarbonization, and also you know with what we'd like to do on the ACCU front or whatever in that market. I think that only sort of adds to that business line that you know there's probably some real opportunities for ASX sort of over the next five years or so in that area.
Okay, maybe just finally, obviously you've talked about Synfini and that's recently launched. I mean, do you think that will ultimately be a material contributor to revenue? And if so, when is that likely to be?
I think it can be. You know, this is the thing. It's very hard when you're at the nascent part of what is. You know, it's very easy for me to talk to the point that actually, blockchain and DLT is gonna be a very important thing going forward. But actually how that plays out, I think the world is still trying to sort out apropos of my comments. You know, I see it growing, and I think it's what we can provide, this sort of technology. But we've also, you know, we're already quite connected into an ecosystem.
If I go to the slide, but the one around technical services, and you look at that, and that's sort of looking at over sort of like a 7-9-year period. I think how the interaction of the connectivity has left us actually growing a whole lot of connections between not just customers to ourselves, but customers to customers. I see that as being where this thing goes. It's a long-term thing that actually allows connectivity and synchronization of industries or you know, like synchronization of whatever the technology is registering or the ledger is looking at, and that then can be accessed by a whole lot of people.
I mean, if you take the CHESS example, CHESS at the moment really just connects to the layer that sits around it of clearing and settlement participants. Sort of CHESS in the future or this technology in the future can really connect to anyone who actually has you know the permissioned rights to actually access it. That is sort of like more of a longer term ecosystem thing. Is it next year? No, I think there'll be small numbers as we grow and try to actually get people excited by the technology. Actually, it's a slow burn, but a very important strategic thing going forward that actually we have that technology. That technology is out there in the market. It's working.
It's also the same technology is working overseas, doing things like repos. You know, I think, you know, Deutsche Börse is using it for other applications. There's certainly a lot going on in the space, and I just think it's, you know, as far as a strategic thing for ASX to be involved in and being a what I would say is sort of like a world leader in this type of permissioned blockchain, I think is a really important thing going forward and something that, you know, like, the company can take benefit on out into the future.
Oh, great. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Nigel.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Andrei Stadnik from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Morning. I wanted to ask two questions if I could. Firstly, you made the comment around electricity derivatives and decarbonization. Can you explain, you know, the connection and, you know, how the electricity derivatives you provided are being used for decarbonization, and any other growth options or initiatives you see around that?
Yeah. I think where it comes from is, you know, like, if you think about what's going on, take, you know, sort of, decarbonization in a general sense, you know, maybe in 10 years' time, how many of us will actually derive their, you know, the electricity, the power that drives their transport around is gonna be probably less about carbon and oil and more about electricity. There's a lot of growth we see in the electricity market over time.
The other thing I would say is that, you know, given, you know, sort of the solar energy things we have on people's roofs, the, you know, wind power and all of these things happening, that actually leads to volatility in the grid, which means actually the second to second and hour to hour pricing of electricity becomes more important. To have a very liquid and tradable market in that area becomes important. People like, you know, who provide storage into the market, you know, who'd be looking to maybe, you know, grant caps against that, or people who are, you know, operate in the market but, you know, don't wanna see their prices go up when electricity spikes because of some particular reason.
It's just this risk management thing and what ASX and the cap floor market, the swaption market, the futures market can stand in the middle of that and actually provide that liquidity and price discovery for people as all of those markets grow. If that's helpful.
Yep. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you. My second question, I wanted to ask around wage inflation. Staff costs were up 13% on PCP. What can ASX do to control wage inflation, or is it just something that's too difficult given the broader tech squeeze and the need to deliver on projects? Is there anything, you know, you think you can do on that front?
Sure. I'll take it first.
Sure.
I'm sure once again, Dom, we both have a view on this.
I think in the first sense. Look, for the half, we actually printed a good expense number. As you well know, it's normally high in the first half, and it comes down in the second half. What we saw in the second quarter was, as we certainly had the same issue that is published in the press, just about jobs and wage growth. Certainly we noticed that as we were replacing the vacancies that we had, we certainly had to pay a little bit more money than what we normally would. We have thought through that, and that's why we have raised the guidance by 1%, prepared that there is necessarily inflation on the wage front in the market right now. I think, you know, it would be strange to not actually know that.
We've reflected that certainly in the guidance. If I just come back, we were helped this half. Certainly you'll see there in administration, we have had a number of projects underway. I think you're aware there have been some regulator reviews and the like. That's actually been absorbed in our administration line actually, because of the lower T&E travel just through COVID. We've actually printed a pretty good half, but we do think it will rise in the second half. Dom?
Yeah. I think I agree with everything that Gill says. You know, the interesting, Andrei, that I would point out is that, look, everyone's talking about this, and I think if you said, what is the pointier end of this, it's you know, it's probably technology, you know, risk and compliance are three areas where actually there is pressure and, you know, certainly those are three things that you know, we are deep in here. You know, certainly there are pressures out there and we're, you know, as Gill said, we're managing those.
I think you did ask about outlook and whether we can manage that. I feel that we are, but yet, that's the price that everyone's paying right now into the aftermath of COVID and paying for talent. We're just part of the same issue, I think.
Yep.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Your next question comes from Kieran Chidgey from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Morning, Gill.
Morning.
Just a couple of follow-up questions. Maybe just starting on the futures business, and some of the mixed trends that are happening there. Obviously you've talked about sort of the good growth in electricity contracts coming through, but I see that average fee per contract this period, I think AUD 1.52, sort of well up on where it was pre-COVID at around AUD 1.40. How much of that is due to the contract mix from things like electricity contracts as opposed to changes in the participant mix due to COVID, and sort of how much of that, I guess, do you see unwinding as futures volumes grow and we get some of those more trading-oriented participants coming back?
Do you want me? Look, I think it's more of just the contract changes going on there. I think, you know, there are changes around. There's a little bit less. In fact, now if I think about it, you're talking about since the beginning of COVID, so you're going back quite a way there. If you look at the prop traders who actually get greater rebates, as you know, Kieran, that's actually come down a bit. Others have gone up a bit, so you've seen that generally come through. Then I think there's a little bit on, you know, the reduction in short-term interest rates and actually the increase in volatility over that period would have actually helped move that along a little bit as well.
A little bit of both of those effects over that time period.
I would agree with Dom. Certainly, this half has been more marked by the fact, obviously, we're not paying the rebates that we had in the past because futures volumes are down. I think that skews that average fee as well.
Yeah.
Okay. All right. Just, I mean, also related to the futures business, and I guess some of the interest income, there was a question on that earlier. From a balance point of view, as we see, hopefully a further recovery in volumes, should we be anticipating a more sort of stagnant participant, sort of, collateral balance, just given the likely shift away from ten-year bond back into shorter dated contracts?
That's a hard one because it goes to open interest or whatever. Yeah, I guess it goes to open interest or whatever. You know, we've seen you know the bond market grow and the open interest in the ten-year futures grow. A lot of that also, Kieran, is to do with you know the open interest around the SPI contract because as I think you suggest correctly, it's you know the ten-year bonds and the SPI are the most sort of like volatile or the biggest value at risk or whatever, as opposed to sort of like the bank bills. Yes, you're right. If that sort of picks up, it won't actually have as much effect on the collateral balances.
If a whole lot of trading or in fact open positions or outright sort of like nets, longs and shorts moved out of the 10 years, that would have had an effect. I think it's probably more. There's a little bit going on between the short end and the long end, but I think it's probably more that the short end recovers rather than like there's a whole bunch of trading in the 10 years that'll move to the short end. I think it's more that there's just a lack of trading in the short end, and that will pick up if monetary policy starts moving again.
Okay. Got it.
Cool.
Maybe just a final question, sort of going back to some of the comments you made around carbon and sort of ACCU type opportunities. Can you just sort of elaborate on what you're actually doing there? You know, I know there is a process being run by the government on that front in terms of carbon exchange, but sort of what role do you hope you might play there?
What the government is looking for is for someone or in fact a group of people to be or group of organizations to be effectively a market to create a market for ACCU. So almost like a spot market in the trading of those units. Then there is also the registry of those units as well. So there's sort of the registry of that, and then also a futures market perhaps over those units, or perhaps the cheapest to deliver of those units because they all have their own idiosyncrasies. They're all sort of a little bit different.
I think what the Clean Energy Regulator is working through what the best structure for that might be, and also, you know, they'll have an RFP out, effectively as to a whole bunch of people who are on their short list to move forward as to pitch for that opportunity.
Okay. ASX is sort of a participant in that process?
That's correct. ASX is in that mix. I, you know, don't expect that to, you know, change anything in our numbers in the immediate term. I think it's more, you know. All of these things are just growing things. If we look out in the medium term, carbon and carbon credits will just be a bigger part of life, I think.
Yep. Just finally on DLT. I'm just wondering if you could give a quick update on when you think you'll be in a position to outline a bit more detail to the market around the revenue model there as sort of you go live early next calendar year.
Yes, I think that will be reasonably soon, I think. Because it's you know, we're obviously with these things, there are discussions with regulators, and then sort of consultation with market. Obviously, there's been a lot of consultation going on. I would expect perhaps next time we speak that there will be, we'll be able to give you more on that. Again, not too far away as the CHESS project sort of like comes towards completion.
All right. Thank you.
Thanks, Kieran.
Thank you. The next question comes from Matt Dunger from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, Matt.
Thank you very much. Guys, just noting the lower FTE at the end of the period, can you talk to the trajectory for FTE in the context of your cost guidance? Also, Gillian, I think you called out some restructuring costs. How much were these, and what was the ongoing impact in the first half?
Sure. In the first instance, the restructuring cost, it really was that operating model redesign or review that we went through at the start of the year. That it was just a cost associated with people associated with that. That's what it is. Also, from an expense perspective, can I just add, that was probably about 1.5% of that 7.6%. I just want everyone to know that's a non-recurring expense. Two, you talk about FTEs. There is average, and then there's spot. Certainly from an average perspective, we certainly were up a tad, but there's churn in those numbers, too. As you know, it's never straight-lined. I think you said it was below, but actually it was above.
Just. Yeah.
Yeah, just. It's the average.
Sorry. I think the end of period.
The spot
at first half 2022 was below second half 2021.
Sorry, I missed that. Sorry, Dom was talking. Sorry, could you say that again?
Sorry. I think the FTE at the end of December was below.
Done.
the June half year.
Yeah. Look, average, it's a bit up.
Yeah.
From a spot, I think the other thing that we're obviously seeing as well is with some people movement and that sort of thing, we do have a bit of a vacancy rate actually coming through, too. There is a balance between the vacancy rate and actually the higher salaries that we're then having to afford for people to come in. I believe at the end of December it will be part of that vacancy rate. I absolutely would be going with average FTE, not spot.
Okay. Thank you. Does that have any impact on CHESS timelines? Just to be clear.
No. No, that actually doesn't. That line doesn't have an impact on CHESS.
Yep.
I'll give you more of a flavor.
Thank you very much.
Actually, I'll give you more of a flavor. You know, we have vacancies across the group, and so you are talking about back office functions, as Dom said before, risk and compliance. You know, it's the whole slew. We can categorically say it's not tied up with the CHESS program.
Sure. Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Matt.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Eric Johnston from The Australian. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good day, and thanks Dom for your time this morning. Look, one of the questions I just wanted to find out, you spoke about your retirement. Why now with the timing? Because you do have a lot of sort of technical builds underway and sort of balls in the air on that front. Are you pulling the plug too soon, so to speak?
Thanks, Eric. No, I'm still here for some time yet. I think what this is more about, Eric, is it's like giving people ample notice around this. You know, with the project, I mean, the industry test environment's open. There's hundreds of thousands of transactions sort of like going through that, you know, as we speak. The broader customer group over the next few months will be bringing into that. That gets, you know, sort of like towards the middle of the year, you're in a stage where effectively, CHESS as a project has been delivered into that environment, and then it's sort of transition and, you know, testing and all of those things happening.
When you sort of think about it, and one of the things, if you were listening through the full presentation, Eric, today, tried to sort of like point out or take you through all the things that we've been doing as a sort of like a strategic project over the last five years or six years. What that is that transformation piece, when you look at it, is all of these things that we've replaced out, of which the last one is CHESS, and the second last one is the equity data warehouse, which is also in industry testing, is just about to go into parallel run. It's a little bit ahead of where CHESS is. All of those things are coming to a close.
That doesn't mean we're not doing more, sort of like revitalization of various things we do. That sort of is an ongoing thing. This is actually the CHESS thing and all the related things around that and some rebuilding of older infrastructure like secondary data centers, communication systems and all that. That's been a sort of like a big project. Where we're getting to is we go into the next stage. The next stage of that is actually capitalizing on that, and that's a really exciting stage for ASX. That is sort of we're at 2022 now. That's sort of 2023 and beyond.
If you think about 2023 and beyond, and think about the fact that I've now been here for nine years, I've been CEO for, I'm in my sixth year of CEO here, the 2023 to 2028, I don't see that I'm the person who can commit to that 2023 to 2028 timeline, 'cause I've already done my, you know, a significant amount of time in the organization. You know, in conversation with the chair, it's actually the thing we should be thinking about here is what's the right thing for ASX over the next 12 to 18 months as we move into CHESS.
When you actually look at what we've been talking about here and look at the counterfactual, is the right thing for me to stay right to the very end of that and through all that testing, and then as soon as the flag goes down on the next new strategy of ASX, you actually change drivers.
Is that the
Sorry.
Is it actually you want to have a crossover period before and you hit the ground running when all of that is completed? I think that's what we thought was the best thing for ASX as opposed to what's the best thing for Dominic Stevens.
Yep. Thanks. Just quickly sort of follow up, so you think all the foundations and the groundwork, you've got that in place at the moment?
Yes. Well, if you look at the slide we put out, there is just a tremendous amount of technology that's actually been rolled out over the last five years. If you look at what's happened to the resilience of the organization, the reduction in incidents and also. I tried to, in that last piece, sort of talk about the optionality of the organization in focusing on technology in our listings business, in focusing on technology with DLT, on focusing on technology in e-settlements in property. These are all things that actually are gonna be the interesting things to talk about in ASX from 2023 to 2030 or the end of the decade.
Yep. Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Eric.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time.
Okay. With that, thank you. I'd just say for anyone or any investors on the line, or I know I will be speaking to analysts this afternoon who you know, just given the news of today, who want to call us up and we can set something up. Thank you everyone for your time here and thanks, Gill. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you, Dom.
Bye-bye.