By Luke Jeffs
LONDON, Oct 6 (Reuters) - Chi-X Europe, the continent's largest share trading platform, is in talks with Britain's Financial Services Authority to find a way of avoiding new fees the Swiss Exchange will charge for using its price data.
The SIX Swiss Exchange plans to impose a new fee of 100,000 Swiss francs ($103,600) on trading rivals, such as Chi-X Europe, Bats Europe and Turquoise, which all use data from the Zurich-based stock market to facilitate Swiss stocks trading.
"The proposed fee amounts to a significant charge for firms at a time when trading revenue is scarce," Chi-X Europe chief executive Alasdair Haynes told Reuters.
"So, rather than paying the new fee, we have contacted the relevant authorities about the possibility of using the prices from our own order book."
Chi-X and its peers, known as multilateral trading facilities (MTF), take data from Europe's largest exchanges, including the Swiss group, so clients can compare the prices in these trading systems' private, dark pool systems with those publicly available on the main exchanges.
Bats Europe and Turquoise, which is owned by the London Stock Exchange, declined to comment.
Werner Buerki, the chief executive of the Swiss exchange's data business Exfeed, said: "We have not increased the fee for MTFs; rather, we have introduced a fee for a new segment of market data consumers."
Chi-X Europe and the other MTFs previously accessed and paid for the Swiss data through third-party data vendors, such as Thomson Reuters.
But from next month the exchange is demanding an additional fee that Chi-X said would more than double what it pays now.
"The Swiss exchange has lost market share over the past year and is now looking to fight to retain that share by charging in different ways. This does not serve the interests of the market at large," Haynes said. The Swiss stock market's dominance of its domestic share trading has been eroded by Chi-X Europe and other newcomers since the introduction of the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive in 2007, which sought to undermine European exchange monopolies.
The exchange's share of Swiss business was 91.4 percent in January 2008, but has fallen to 66.5 percent this month, according to data from Thomson Reuters.
Chi-X and other MTFs hold the remainder. (Editing by Will Waterman) ($1=.9654 Swiss Franc)