“Our Goal Is to Lift the Trading Experience of Our Clients Across Europe to the Next Level.”

At the 2025 European Women in Finance Awards, Alexandra Roby, Head of Equity Sales UK & Ireland in the business unit Exchanges at SIX, was named the winner in the category ‘Excellence in Exchanges & Trading Platforms (Equities)’. The laudatio emphasized that ‘in her current role, she made outstanding progress in developing the sales presence across the exchanges operated by SIX, including client education to support new trading approaches, adding that she is committed to driving innovation in finance and widely respected for her technical skills’.

It was a total surprise to me, so it felt unexpected at first. But then I felt very honoured. It seems a bit unreal. The response at the ceremony, in the comments to our announcement on social media and in personal messages has been so overwhelmingly positive. I can only say thank you – to everybody who congratulated me, but especially to all my colleagues at SIX. This award definitely belongs to all of them too.

It’s really difficult to pin down one thing. First of all, SIX as a company has recently shifted into a higher gear, so to speak. After having acquired first the Spanish BME Exchange, now the more recent acquisition of Aquis clearly underpins our ambition to become a truly pan-European exchange, a leading venue both on the listing and the trading side. This has provided us with lots of exciting topics to interact with clients on. 

One example we’ve already implemented is SpainAtMid, a non-displayed order book for Spanish equities which replicates the successful design of SwissAtMid. When we introduced this service in in Switzerland in 2016, SIX Swiss Exchange was the first primary exchange in Europe to introduce a non-displayed pool on the same matching engine as its central limit order book. It has since become the number 1 dark pool in Swiss equities, so that’s our goal for SpainAtMid as well. 

Another client benefit will be the deployment of Equinox, Aquis’ next-generation trading technology, across SIX. It’ll allow clients to access all our exchanges through one standardized connection – think ‘one plug, multiple trading venues’. Our goal is to lift the trading experience of our clients across Europe to the next level and create new growth opportunities for them.

We operate in a very competitive environment. Whether its other incumbents or MTFs: we’re all trying to operate our markets as efficiently as possible and introduce services that add value to our clients. I believe that a defining characteristic of SIX which sets us apart from our peers and competitors is that we’ve been following our path of ‘pragmatic innovation’. 

One might say: innovation is easy, improvement is difficult. For us, launching new products and services is not a goal in itself – we want to make sure that they actually add value to our clients and the market as a whole. For example, we consider and try to minimize the implementation effort on the client side. And we believe innovation should reduce fragmentation, not add to it. Which is why me and the whole team at SIX – be it Sales, Relationship Management or Product – maintain a very close dialogue with our clients, to ensure what we do reflects what they need. 

Our successful pragmatic innovations range from new order books and market models to functionalities and order types across various trading segments. One that deserves a special mention is AVD, or Auction Volume Discovery. This hidden order type which helps trading members to safely find liquidity over and above participation caps, without revealing their hand to the market. We launched AVD in May 2023 as another global first, and the greatest recognition might be that our peers have recently started to copy it. It proves it’s a successful idea which does benefit the wider industry. 

SIX supports a number of initiatives, including membership in Advance, an association that promotes women in leadership positions. But also a dedicated Gender Diversity Network for sharing experiences and advice internally, specially designed benefits to support employees at every stage of life or multiple programs and benefits to support working parents. And via its commitment to a fair pay policy as well as an LGBTQ+ network to foster an LGBTQ+ friendly environment.