Building a Regional Market Starts with Reducing Complexity

For years, the integration of Latin American capital markets has been a shared aspiration. The logic is clear: more connected markets can achieve greater scale, expand opportunities for investors and issuers, and strengthen their ability to attract capital in an increasingly global environment.

But integration does not begin by declaring three markets to be one. It begins by removing the complexity that investors, intermediaries, issuers, and regulators face every day. Reducing that complexity is the practical path towards a regional market that can actually work.

Behind every trade sit rules, technologies, protocols, intermediaries, regulations, and market practices that have evolved separately over decades. A regional market can only emerge when those layers begin to converge in ways that reduce friction without erasing what each market still needs locally.

That conviction has guided our work since the integration of the stock exchanges of Chile, Colombia, and Peru in late 2023. For nuam, building a single market across these three countries is a strategic imperative. It means creating the conditions for these markets to become more connected, more accessible, and more relevant over time.

This past July, we reached one of the most important milestones on that path. The Santiago Stock Exchange began operating on the same trading engine already used by the markets of Colombia and Peru: three countries, three regulators, and one shared technological foundation with harmonised trading rules.

This is a significant step. While the three countries do not yet operate as a single market, we have completed one of its essential building blocks: a common trading infrastructure that makes deeper integration possible.

From Three Infrastructures to a Common Foundation

Today, the equities markets of Chile, Colombia, and Peru operate on a common technology infrastructure, based on Nasdaq Eqlipse Trading as the matching engine and nuam Trading Workstation as the interface for intermediaries.

In Chile's case, the implementation represented the most significant technological upgrade to its equities market in more than 15 years. The new infrastructure can process up to 10,000 transactions per second, with latency below 100 microseconds and approximately ten times the capacity of the previous technology. These figures matter, although the transformation goes far beyond speed or capacity.

A common infrastructure can simplify processes, facilitate future connections, and allow participants operating regionally to face fewer technological and operational differences between countries. Over time, this can also translate into a more efficient environment for attracting new participants, channelling investment, strengthening liquidity, and expanding opportunities for both investors and companies seeking access to the capital markets.

A Market Transformation, Not Just a Technological One

Trading technology, however, is only one of the layers needed to build a regional market.

For three markets to move towards greater integration, it is also necessary to work on the rules, operating processes, and regulatory frameworks that determine how their participants interact.

In recent years, Chile, Colombia, and Peru have made progress on regulatory changes aimed at removing barriers and progressively enabling greater interoperability among their markets. This work is often less visible than a technology migration, but it is equally important: a common infrastructure can only reach its full potential if it is accompanied by compatible rules and by a framework that allows intermediaries and investors to operate regionally.

A critical next step is clearing. A common trading infrastructure is an important foundation, but deeper integration also requires progress in the post-trade environment and, critically, the regulatory trust needed to enable brokers from one country to access the other markets directly.

Cross-border access requires trust between jurisdictions: confidence in how participants are supervised, how risks are managed, and how market infrastructures operate in each country. Building that trust takes time and requires close co-ordination among regulators, market infrastructures, and participants.

Clearing is an important part of that equation. Moving towards a more integrated post-trade framework can help reduce friction, improve the use of capital, and create conditions for more seamless cross-border participation.

A Different Path to Scale

There is still work ahead. Building a regional market requires continued progress on regulatory, operational, and commercial aspects, as well as ongoing efforts to reduce barriers for investors and intermediaries.

Today, we have something that only a few years ago seemed almost impossible: three markets that share trading technology and increasingly compatible rules.

Ultimately, integration will not be measured by the number of platforms we share, but by our ability to facilitate the flow of capital, expand financing opportunities for companies, and offer investors more efficient access to our markets. That is the market we want to build.

For markets without sufficient scale on their own, this may offer a different path forward: building scale by making it easier for markets to work together.