ASX CEO Dominic Stevens will retire from the market operator this year, following a difficult period including a major trading outage and a challenging transition of its technology systems.

ASX said the board, now chaired by Damian Roche, has begun a process for “a timely and orderly transition to a new CEO”.

Mr Stevens has announced his departure 14 months before the scheduled switching on of market-critical distributed ledger technology that will replace the CHESS clearing and settlement system.

Mr Stevens, who has been ASX CEO for six years and on the ASX board for nine, will stay in the job until a successor commences. ASX said in a separate release alongside its half-year results this will “ensure stability for the company, assist in an orderly transfer of executive responsibility, and maintain ASX’s focus on providing safe and secure critical financial market infrastructure.”

He told analysts the technology transformation of the exchange that kicked off in 2016 was “nearing completion”.

The resignation comes after the ASX delivered a solid first-half result with net profit up 3.5 per cent to $250.3 million, with revenue up 6.6 per cent driven by a record half for capital raisings and the most number of listings since 2008. But expenses also rose sharply, and ASX lifted its guidance for full-year expense growth.

Mr Stevens has presided over an ambitious transformation of multiple ASX technology systems to modernise the infrastructure that runs financial markets. But an outage in November 2020, followed by a damning ASIC report, put pressure on him.

ASX CEO Dominic Stevens will retire from the ASX this year. Rhett Wyman

Mr Roche said Mr Stevens had provided “ample notice of his retirement plans for which we are grateful”.

The chairman said in a statement Mr Stevens had built ASX to be one of the world’s top-10 listed exchange groups by market capitalisation.

The world-first distributed ledger clearing and settlement software is due to turn on in April 2023 and is currently in testing. The complex project has been delayed three times, and the senior executive overseeing it, former deputy CEO Peter Hiom, resigned from ASX last year.

“The replacement of CHESS is progressing well, with the fully integrated industry test environment open and operating successfully. Dominic looks forward to transitioning with the new CEO to help them to come up to speed on this key project,” Mr Roche said.

ASX said Mr Steven’s tenure included transforming ASX’s technology “from ageing to contemporary systems and platforms” and “expanding ASX’s focus on technology”, including the CHESS replacement project and “building an enviable listed capital market for local and global technology companies”.

ASX chief executive Dominic Stevens. RELATED ASX CEO leaves $250m in unfinished business Over the medium term Mr Stevens hopes the distributed ledger technology, which will create a single source of truth about the market that brokers can rely on, will open new sources of revenue for the exchange. The plans for income diversification have been welcomed by analysts.

Operating incidents have fallen by 85 per cent over the last five years and the 2020 outage was the only “severity 1” incident at ASX in the three years to December 2021.

Nevertheless, ASX has been battling regulatory scrutiny over the outage which saw ASX Trade crippled by a software bug, relating to a logic problem in the code managing “tailor-made combination” orders.

ASX faced criticism from competitor Chi-X about its decision to pause the market when the systems went down, preventing trades in the ASX system from being switched across to Chi-X.

A report into the outage led the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to impose licensing conditions on ASX following an investigation into the week-long disruption to sharemarket trading.

ASIC chairman Joe Longo said he was “very disappointed” ASX went ahead with a software upgrade when the project was not ready to go live.

ASIC called for the ASX board and management to be personally accountable for their actions.

Egon Zehnder will assist Mr Roche and the ASX find the replacement for Mr Stevens, who said he remained committed to ASX “and to ensuring my successor has time to get their feet under the table in preparation for the next chapter in ASX’s future”.

In its interim results, ASX said its after tax profit had lifted 3.5 per cent to $250.3 million on operating revenue that ticked over half a billion dollars.

It lifted its interim dividend by 4 cents per share to $1.16, representing a payout ratio of 90 per cent of profits.

With analysts nervous about ASX expense growth driven by the ambitious technology projects and increased regulatory scrutiny, ASX said expenses had grown by 7.6 per cent to $163 million and lifted its guidance for cost growth in the full-year.

Expenses are now tipped to grow between 7 per cent and 8 per cent, higher than the previous band of 5 per cent to 7 per cent.