TMX Group Ltd. announced on Wednesday that it signed a $409-million deal to purchase Cboe Australia and Cboe Canada from Cboe Global Markets Inc., subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions.
The operator of the Toronto Stock Exchange and other exchanges said the deal will expand its global presence, which currently includes more than 260 companies interlisted with markets outside of Canada, 27 of which are in Australia.
It’ll also widen its footprint in the global mining industry — TMX Group said it’s currently home to more than half of the world’s listed mining companies, representing $1 trillion in market capitalization.
“Today’s announcement represents a bold step forward for our markets — the creation of a stronger Canadian champion to the benefit of our issuer and participant communities, to our employees, to our stakeholders,” John McKenzie, CEO of TMX Group, told analysts in a conference call Wednesday morning.
Cboe Australia and Cboe Canada offer equities trading and listing venues and market data services. The businesses earned $87 million in combined revenue in 2025.
McKenzie said TMX Group’s exchanges and the Cboe exchanges will function as separate entities but will be delivered on a single platform that’s expected to reduce complexity and costs for Canadian market participants.
“You think about connectivity costs that are duplicative, data centre costs that are duplicative, access fees that we’ll be able to harmonize and eliminate,” he said.
“We expect to actually save the industry money, make it more efficient, and at a time [when], in terms of the global ecosystem, making the Canadian market more efficient and more competitive is a very compelling opportunity.”
Analysts questioned what this will mean for competition in Canada’s capital markets.
McKenzie said while the transaction hasn’t yet closed, TMX Group “wouldn’t have brought this to the table if we didn’t have very strong confidence that we could see this through to approval.”
He noted that TMX Group (then Maple Group) previously acquired Alpha Trading Systems in 2012 “at a time when there was a lot more concentration in the Canadian market than there is today” and that it sees the capital market ecosystem as a North American or global one, as “we are competing with U.S. exchanges every day for capital and for flow, for listing activity, for capital raising.”
In an interview, Richard Carleton, CEO of the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE), which was one of the bidders on the Cboe exchanges, said the CSE “has been laying the groundwork to continue to be able to provide a competitive alternative to the TMX” with its listing services.
He also noted that CIX Trading Inc., an aspiring alternative trading system, is expected to launch this year, bringing more competition to the ecosystem.
Carleton added that the industry is looking to see what the TMX Group-Cboe deal would mean for existing trading venues that Cboe Canada operates, “because, obviously, with the exception of MATCHNow, there’s quite a deal of overlap with venues that are currently operated by TMX Group.” It’s also keen to see whether “market data fees and connectivity fees will, in fact, go down” and if there will be “a simplification in terms of the routing and trading strategies as a result of there being fewer venues available in Canada.”
TMX Group said the acquisitions of Cboe Australia and Cboe Canada are expected to close separately, each after required regulatory approvals have been obtained.
Cboe Global Markets announced plans in October 2025 to sell its Australian and Canadian businesses as part of “a strategic realignment to sharpen its strategic focus on core strengths and emerging opportunities.” In a release issued Wednesday, it named event and prediction markets, digital assets and tokenization, and 24/7 “on-chain markets with atomic settlement” as some of the emerging opportunities that it’s eyeing.