Aquis Exchange has received approval from the UK regulator to begin trading as a multilateral trading facility ahead of its proposed launch this month.

The exchange said in a statement that it had been approved by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. Chief executive Alasdair Haynes said in the statement: “We are very pleased to have received the green light from the FCA just a year after announcing the creation of Aquis Exchange. We can now forge ahead with the introduction of subscription pricing to the European cash equities market.”

Aquis will announce a launch date after a dress rehearsal on November 9.

Haynes, the former chief executive of Chi-X Europe, told Markets Media in an interview last month that the exchange could have 33 clients by the first quarter of next year. “It takes time for firms to get connected to a new venue and start trading, but we could have 14-15 companies trading by the end of the year and another 18 in the first quarter of next year,” he said.

He introduced a subscription model after seeing his teenage son buy a new mobile phone and choosing a payment package based on his data usage. At Aquis, customers pay in advance for message traffic, rather than a percentage of the total value of each trade, as on rival exchanges. Designated market makers are not charged for messages related to posted liquidity. Other Aquis customers can pay £2,500 per month for up to 25,000 messages a day or £10,000 a month for more than 25,000 messages a day with no upper limit.

Haynes founded Aquis Exchange to provide more competition in Europe where more than 90% of equity trading in each country takes place in two venues – the relevant national exchange or BATS Chi-X.

BATS Chi-X Europe said in a statement that it had an overall market share of 22.9% in October and remained the largest pan-European stock exchange by market share and notional value traded. The exchange said it set new monthly market share record of 9.6% in depositary receipts.

Average daily notional value traded on BATS Chi-X Europe was €7.8bn last month, up from €7bn in October last year. In the European securities markets covered by BATS Chi-X Europe, the total consolidated industry average daily notional value traded was €33.9bn in October, up from €33.8bn in September.

This month BATS Chi-X Europe is due to launch its pan-European listings business with BlackRock listing two exchange-traded funds – the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets UCITS ETF and iShares MSCI World Minimum Volatility UCITS ETF – as secondary listings.

Rival NYSE Euronext said in its results today that European cash average daily value of 1.3 million transactions in the third quarter of 2013 was an increase of 2% from the third quarter of last year. The total value traded on the European cash market was $88.4bn in the third quarter of 2013, 5% leads than $92.6bn in the same period last year.

These are likely to be NYSE Euronext’s last quarterly results as an independent company as it is being taken over by rival ICE.