GPW postpones the roll-out of GPW WATS

The Warsaw Stock Exchange has decided to postpone the production roll-out of the GPW WATS trading system. The decision has been taken following a review of the results of tests and a dress rehearsal conducted on 4 October 2025. The new roll-out schedule will be set in consultation with market participants.

The dress rehearsal was the first mandatory test for all Exchange Members. It covered migration from the UTP system to GPW WATS and a test of the business continuity plan, including a contingency scenario with recovery of trading in the backup data centre. The dress rehearsal and preceding tests identified areas for improvement, in particular trading session surveillance, contingency response, system parameterisation, and the need for additional functional and performance tests.

“This is a responsible decision which follows an analysis of test results and readiness indicators on the part of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Delaying the roll-out of the system will allow us to ensure its superior performance and functionality and accommodate the additional change requests submitted by Exchange Members,” said Sławomir Panasiuk, Vice-President of the Management Board of the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

The schedule of further work on the roll-out of GPW WATS will be defined jointly with the Implementation Committee comprised of representatives of Exchange Members and cooperating institutions. The new roll-out schedule will be published in the coming weeks. Until the switchover, UTP remains a stable trading system. GPW maintains its existing business continuity planning (BCP) procedures.

The GPW WATS project has run since July 2019 as a research and development project co-financed by the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR). The trading system GPW WATS developed in the project in August 2024 (according to the opinion of an independent auditor, a global technology consulting firm) delivered approximately 80% of the functional requirements after five years of work, without any integration work having been started.

Over the past twelve months, in addition to completing the development of the system to meet all functional requirements, intensive work has been carried out to adapt and integrate several systems on GPW side which, together with the trading system, form the architecture necessary to support trading and distribute market data. Work has been carried out in parallel to eliminate the technical debt, which required significant investments in infrastructure and a new data processing centre.

The objective of the GPW WATS project remains unchanged: to provide a reliable and scalable platform tailored to the expectations of market participants, supporting the long-term development of GPW’s offering.