London Stock Exchange today welcomes the National Timing Centre programme Steering Committee, led by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) with programme partners, to the market closing ceremony.

NPL is the UK’s National Metrology Institute and custodian of the UK’s national time scale, UTC(NPL). The National Timing Centre (NTC) programme is paving the way for trusted and assured time and frequency distribution across the UK. This critical initiative, led by NPL, is being delivered with partner organisations in government including Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Critical National Infrastructure systems including emergency services, telecoms networks, the energy sector, broadcast and finance organisations all rely on increasingly precise, and accurate time, in order to synchronise systems and timestamp data. Time is typically accessed from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) like GPS. Any breach or failure in GNSS would jeopardise our digital infrastructure and could potentially impact the UK economy by over £1 billion per day (reported by London Economics in 2017).

The NTC programme will enable the UK to move away from reliance on GNSS for time, and deliver resilient time and frequency signals, providing confidence to our Critical National Infrastructure. To this end, the National Timing Centre Steering Committee is discussing the future of timing resilience for the UK, including new geographic locations and enhanced traceable time for regulatory compliance for financial trading systems and Critical National Infrastructure.  

For financial markets, IOSCO – the International Organization of Securities Commissions – recommended in its first report of 2020, FR01/2020, that trading venues and their participants use, as their reference, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the global time scale. From the days pre-internet and floor trading where price discovery and trading were measured in minutes, today the electronic order books of the London Stock Exchange and Turquoise match trades with a time traceability (to UTC) of 1 microsecond – 1 millionth of a second – within a maximum drift of 100 microseconds, compliant with the current regulatory environment.  

In the future, institutions such as the London Stock Exchange will be key drivers of timing requirements and in providing timing solutions for UK industry within finance. The current phase of the NTC programme ends in 2024, but the challenge requires much longer-term intervention. Today members of the Steering Committee and representatives at London Stock Exchange have been discussing key aspects of future capability and what needs to be done now to enable resilient time for the future.