Alasdair Haynes, chief executive of Aquis Exchange, is confident that the pan-European equities trading venue will reach its volume targets this year as it adds eight new markets later this month.

Aquis Exchange launched in November last year and offered the top 100 UK stocks, the largest 40 French stocks and the 25 premier Dutch stocks. The 30 biggest German stocks were added in January 2014. On 26 June the venue will expand with the largest stocks from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. Haynes said the largest volume of trading was in UK stocks, followed by France.

He told Markets Media: “We cover the largest stocks in each market and will be looking to add other shares. We will add other markets once we have the right liquidity providers and have built the right ecosystem.”

Haynes said the exchange was focussed on adding new clients, but also ensuring that existing customers use Aquis in all parts of their business.

“We launched with six or seven clients, some of whom were not trading, but we now have 12 or 13, the vast majority of whom are trading and nobody has fallen out of the pipeline,” he added.

Haynes is the former chief executive of Chi-X Europe, and members of his former team joined him at Aquis after Chi-X Europe was acquired by Bats Global Markets.

Aquis Exchange has introduced a subscription pricing model for equities trading. Users are charged a set monthly fee based on the message traffic they generate, rather than a percentage of the value of each stock that they trade. Small firms pay the minimum subscription while at the opposite end of the scale members can pay the maximum fee for unlimited message data, subject to a “fair usage” policy.

“We are still at first base in terms of volume,” added Haynes. “If volumes are the same beyond this year then we will have issues, but I am confident that will not be the case as we have had higher volumes every week.”

Featured image via Dollar Photo Club