Europe’s largest stock exchange Euronext is moving its data center out of London to Italy because it needs a “predictable regulatory environment” that the UK can’t provide post-Brexit.
Euronext moved its infrastructure from Paris to London in 2011. The finance company was based in a facility in Basildon owned by Ice Data Services, from where trades on its exchanges had been executed for the last 10 years.
However, following the recent acquisition of Borsa Italiana Group, Euronext announced it was migrating its infrastructure to an Aruba S.p.A. facility in Bergamo, outside Milan, Italy.
In February, Euronext CFO Giorgio Modica said the company was doing “preparatory work” on basing all of its physical infrastructure at the group level in Milan. The first part of the Group’s core migration is set for 2022.
At the time the company said the move was ‘partly to do with business, and partly to do with the current political landscape in the UK’ following its exit from the European Union. This week the company explained in more detail how Brexit influenced its decision to move back to mainland Europe and stay within the EU.
“We want to have a critical part of our infrastructure within a predictable regulatory environment,” Euronext CEO Stephane Boujnah told BBC’s Marketplace this week. “And we have no visibility as to what will be the future of regulations applying to circulation of data between the European Union and a third country like what the UK has become post-Brexit.”
Boujnah said London will remain an important financial hub for the UK and will still teams in London to serve local customers, but Euronext’s core business is to serve companies in the European Union and so needs to be regulated within the EU.
“Now that the UK has decided to build its future outside the EU, critical Euronext infrastructure will stay within the European Union, hence outside the UK. And Brexit is big decisions, and big decisions come with big consequences.”
Boujnah has previously said Euronext had considered moving its data center back to Paris or even Amsterdam, but had settled on Bergamo following the deal with Borsa Italiana.
