The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is about to see another departure from its leadership team as the Chief Financial Officer, Gillian Larkins has decided to leave the stock exchange at the end of August.
The official announcement made on Monday mentioned that she is going to “pursue new opportunities elsewhere” without any specifics.
According to the exchange, “she has shown dedicated and strategic leadership to overhaul the finance area and bring a more rigorous approach to the financial management of ASX.”
She will continue to work with the exchange for the next two months, guiding with the year-end activities. The exchange is looking for her successor now.
It is one of the many top executive exits in the Aussie stock exchange over the recent months. Earlier, Dominic Stevens, the long-running CEO of ASX, announced his resignation. He will be succeeded by Helen Lofthouse, who will take over the apex role on August 1. The exchange’s Head of Listings, Max Cunningham also parted last April.
Commenting on Larkins’ exit, Stevens said: “She leaves ASX with a strong Finance and Facilities team in place, which is well-positioned to continue to deliver for our stakeholders.”
A Strong Background
Larkins is leaving the Sydney-based exchange after almost four years. With her background in accounting, she headed the financial division of other Aussie companies as well.
Before joining ASX, she was the Chief Financial Officer at Sydney-based Perpetual Limited, a financial services company, for six years. Also, she was the CFO and Managing Director at Westpac as well as in Australia and New Zealand for Citi.
Meanwhile, the ASX is under regulatory scrutiny for a day-long outage in November 2020 due to technical issues. The Aussie regulator imposed additional conditions on ASX’s license after that and recently asked the trading industry players to build a system that can provide services even during market outages.
Furthermore, ASX is going to replace its legacy CHESS settlement system with a blockchain-based technology, but that has been delayed several times.
