In October 2025 the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) completed its AUD $16m acquisition of the National Stock Exchange of Australia (NSX), another market primarily focused on early-stage, entrepreneurial companies with strength in the resource sector. Nearly a year later Gladiator Metals became the first Canadian dual listing on the National Stock Exchange of Australia on 23 September 2026.

Gladiator Metals also became the first firm to benefit from the National Stock Exchange of Australia’s  “Low Doc Dual Listing” process, which enables companies with a primary listing on approved Canadian exchanges to list in Australia in a timely and cost-efficient manner. The firm was also NSX’s biggest listing in a decade. Jason Bontempo, chief executive of Gladiator, said in a statement that the company wanted to establish a secondary listing on the National Stock Exchange of Australia due to growing interest from Australian investors for an Australian-led enterprise developing a high-grade copper-gold project in Canada.

Bontempo added: “We believe the combination of the CSE’s affiliation with the NSX, an experienced management team and a regulatory framework designed for venture-stage companies creates a compelling opportunity to build stronger capital market links between Canada and Australia.”

Max Cunningham, chief executive of the National Stock Exchange of Australia, told Markets Media that the firm had worked “very hard” to implement the low documentation listing process and to make that low cost. He said: “We have had very good waivers on our rules, and a good engagement from the Australian and Canadian regulators about fast-tracking dual listings.”

NSX has had “a lot of interest” from Canadian firms wanting to dual list, according to Cunningham.

“We have a pipeline of dual listings and we have also had four or five companies move from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to NSX in the last year,” he added. “We are also speaking to a handful of IPOs.”

Cunningham took on his current role in June 2024. He was previously chief executive of FXC, which provides services to private companies; executive general manager listings and issuer services at the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) between 2013 to 2022, and head of equity capital markets Australia at Goldman Sachs.

He was introduced to Richard Carleton, chief executive of the Canadian Securities Exchange during his first week at the National Stock Exchange of Australia, as someone who ran a similar business, and they spoke for around 12 months.

“Richard gave us some ideas on strategy but we were a listed company with limited resource to capital and a share price that wasn’t going anywhere,” added Cunningham, “CSE stepped in and made an offer at a premium to the share price.”

This was a good opportunity to transfer control of the business from the public markets to a private company, especially as CSE had built a very similar business in Canada, according to Cunningham. CSE created a new holding company, CNSX Global Markets, and the Canadian and Australian exchanges operate side by side under this unbrella.

New technology

CNSX Global Markets is providing funding as the National Stock Exchange of Australia rolls out new technology to potentially go live towards the end of 2027, which Cunningham described as “pretty ambitious.”

In April this year the National Stock Exchange of Australia Limited announced that it had chosen Aquis Exchange, a subsidiary of European financial market infrastructure SIX Group, to provide a matching engine and market surveillance tools. Cunningham said the Aquis partnership includes software licensing, a hardware component and a data center component.

“You can’t do any of this without humans, so the local team is expanding, and all of these things would not have been possible without the change of ownership,” added Cunningham.

David Stevens, chief executive of Aquis, said in a statement this demonstrates the quality and strength of Aquis’ world-class matching engine, Equinox, and reinforces its resilience, scalability and performance. Stevens added: “NSX is on an exciting growth trajectory, and Aquis is proud to play a key role in supporting its continued expansion.”

NSX said the initiative will transform its market infrastructure into a next-generation trading environment designed for high-performance low-latency execution, with the capacity to support future market growth and product development across equities and equity-like instruments. Cunningham added that Aquis is already operating in large European markets, so was likely to be approved by the Australian regulator, and the technology can support off-the-shelf products that are not available in Australia.

He said the rollout of Aquis Equinox will bring a trading platform with cutting edge low-latency and the highest order volume capacity in the Australian market. He continued that there are only half a dozen companies capable of providing industrial-grade market technology with ultra-low latency.

“We wanted one that wasn’t in Australia and offers diversity,” Cunningham added. “One of the things that will enable us to do is to be a third trading venue for Australian securities, which has received a lot of interest from market makers and retail brokers.”

Competition

The Australian market has been through a lot of change in recent years. In 2021 Cboe Global Markets acquired Chi-X Australia, which had been launched ten years earlier as a competitor to the incumbent ASX.

In April this year Cboe announced plans to sell both Cboe Canada and Cboe Australia to TMX Group, which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange for equities and Montréal Exchange for derivatives. TMX also provides post‑trade services including central counterparty clearing, clearing, settlement, custody, and depository functions for Canadian securities markets.

On 2 August 2026 Cboe completed the sale of Cboe Australia, which had around 20% of Australia’s equity market daily turnover, according to ASIC, the Australian regulator.

“They are a trading venue and we are a listings venue, although that could evolve,” said Cunningham. “CSE and NSX trade against incumbent monopolists in their respective markets, so we are adept at dealing with competition and relaxed about that.”

Growth strategy

Cunningham said: “We have a regulator that is pro-competition and very engaged in how we can bring more capital and liquidity into the market.”

He believes ASX, the incumbent exchange, has neglected micro-cap and pre-revenue companies, and is more focused on large cap companies going into the benchmark index. NSX has cited a report from Macquarie Equity Research that estimated that nearly 550 companies could potentially list on NSX. Cunningham gave the example of about 1,200 companies listed locally that are below AUD $100m in size.

“We want to create the equivalent of a venture market here, and that is disproportionately in the mining sector in Australia and Canada,” he added.

There are also potentially early-stage opportunities in other sectors including life sciences, according to Cunningham. A handful of Asian companies listed on NSX but Cunningham sees more opportunity in attracting mining companies from South America and added there has always been good interest New Zealand companies coming into Australia.

He highlighted that Urbana Corporation, a Canadian investment company that invests in the financial sector, is a shareholder in CSE and also owns a stake in Evolve Funds Group, one of the fastest-growing ETF issuers in Canada. “We regard being part of the Urbana family as really big for us,” said Cunningham.

For example, Urbana has also invested in Blue Ocean Technologies, the U.S. ATS which provides overnight trading and has recently opened an office in Melbourne. “We have connectivity into what they are doing and supporting the region in Asia,” added Cunningham.

He expects NSX to be genuinely competitive at all levels in 2028 after attracting more listings and after the new technology platform goes live as he believes the firm will have a cutting edge of less latency. “We think we will be competitive on price for trading fees, able to lower costs for brokers, and offer some new services,” said Cunningham.