March 30, 2026 – NZX is pleased to announce the launch of the S&P/NZX 20 Index Futures on April 28, 2026, providing investors with a low-cost hedging tool to manage risk or gain exposure to New Zealand’s equity markets.

Index futures are exchange-traded contracts that lock in a price for exposure to the S&P/NZX 20 Index, with settlement on a set date in the future. On expiry, the contract is cash settled based on the index level, so gains or losses reflect how the index has moved over the contract term. This will allow investors, including KiwiSaver funds, to adjust their New Zealand equity exposure as markets change, while helping support trading activity and liquidity in NZX listed companies. New Zealand has been an outlier among first-world economies in not having liquid index futures markets, especially when comparing against other similar developed economies such as Poland, Portugal and Sweden.

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People talk about “latency” in markets like it’s inherently suspicious. We think that’s the wrong frame. The real issue isn’t speed; it’s synchronicity: how quickly different points of view converge on the same market reality. Questions I hear often go something like this:

Why does speed matter? Isn’t low latency a bad thing? Should firms that build faster connectivity even exist?

I think the word “speed” (or “latency”) has been successfully framed as a moral issue. It is not. It is an engineering reality inside any distributed system.

So, let’s use the better word:

Synchronicity.

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In the early 2010s many financial firms continued an ancient human tradition: shrinking the time it takes to learn about new information in order to manage risk sooner. This time, it was a race to build wireless infrastructure to interconnect key financial venues. Fast forward to today, and as is typical with sprints like this, there was heavy attrition. Very few were successful at doing it at scale.

Lots of stories to tell about this journey some day, but, the net of it is McKay Brothers became the independent commercial champion building and operating such infrastructure, and I believe it is substantially because of our commitment to operate a level playing field platform where all market participants can access the same experience of markets.

If you are wondering how broad “infrastructure” gets for us, it ranges from digging holes for the foundations of 200 foot tall cell towers to programming our own FPGAs. Yes, really. The team is an amazing diversity of backgrounds, and somehow we vibe incredibly well.

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This comes just over a year after the firm built and launched its subscription-based diligence library, now Heron Data Libraries, an important milestone in broadening how clients access Blue Heron’s research and insight. As Heron Intelligence, the firm is building on that momentum through continued investment in technology and AI-enabled capabilities that help transform qualitative insight into structured intelligence and proprietary data at scale. The result is a more powerful platform for investors seeking differentiated insight, earlier signals, and greater conviction throughout their investment process.

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