Stock Exchange Interconnections and Legal Issues in Data Exchange

If philosophical cybernetics was interested in stock exchanges, it would probably treat them as relatively simple information structures. From that perspective, stock exchanges can be viewed as places where data on supply and demand of various negotiable instruments are processed. Besides that, stock exchanges, as institutions, provide respective transactions with additional informational (organisational) value that mostly consist of trust regarding the traders, clearing etc. Consequently, a stock exchange interconnection can be seen as very natural process providing for bigger pool of useful data. One of key tasks in the establishment of exchange schemes is then not to hinder or diminish the added information value, i.e. to at least keep the existing level of trust. In that sense, one of the most important components of interconnection design is the legal compliance. In the comment, we will examine some of the most emerging legal issues in data sharing between stock exchanges that were subject to examination under recently concluded project ‘Creating a legal and regulatory framework for interconnections between stock exchanges: A comparative study of the UK and Taiwan’ funded by the British Academy (UK) and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan. We will particularly focus in this comment on compliance issues in cross-border transfers of personal data and newly emerging regulatory phenomenon of cybersecurity.