ASX's last tango in Paris

This week's renewed plunge in the value of ASX Limited shares – hitting a 10-year low of $44.63 just when global markets are roaring – is a salutary reminder of just how poorly-managed the national exchange operator has been for the better part of two decades. It also underlines the magnitude of the job ahead of incoming ASX CEO Anthony Attia, the former Euronext Paris CEO, who lands in Sydney in September. Attia had better come packing industrial-sized rolls of plastic sheeting with him: fixing the ASX will be messy. 

Having worked for most of his life in Paris, where middle-management laziness and the entitlement of the grandes écoles elite work hand-in-glove to stifle efficiency and dampen innovation, Attia will have seen some real corporate shitshows. But nothing will have prepared him for the ASX, one of the most dysfunctional and talent-deprived organisations to have ever climbed out of the primordial slime.

The ASX's core problem is that it is, in almost every respect, an absolute monopoly. That status encouraged the board and management to take great liberties with the franchise and its customer base, slashing costs and grossly under-investing in technology, all to manufacture profits that were utterly unsustainable. It also sparked a level of hubris that made Narcissus look amateurish.