The Nasdaq OMX Group, Inc. and the Financial Conduct Authority announced that the FCA has officially gone live with NASDAQ OMX's SMARTS Integrity market surveillance platform to enhance its monitoring of transaction reports across the UK's financial markets. SMARTS Integrity provides the FCA with a surveillance platform for the detection of market abuse across financial instruments admitted to trading on regulated or prescribed markets including any underlying derivatives. The FCA is leveraging the scalable and extensible NASDAQ OMX platform to enhance its coverage of current and future European legislation such as the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) and Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). (NASDAQ OMX was originally selected in September 2012.

Turkey is in talks with London Stock Exchange Group plc (LSE:LSE) and The Nasdaq OMX Group, Inc. (NasdaqGS:NDAQ) for strategic partnership with its Istanbul Stock Exchange. Ali Babacan, Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey said that Turkey is in talks with the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq OMX Group about a strategic partnership as the government seeks to make Istanbul an international financial hub. Babacan said, "We give much importance to Bourse Istanbul's international relations. We have signed agreements with Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong within the last year. We are now having strategic partnership talks with London and Nasdaq because we are aiming for Istanbul to be one of the most important 10 financial centers (in the world) in 2023." Xavier Rolet, Chief Executive Officer of London Stock Exchange declined to comment on recent reports that the LSE is in acquisition talks with the Istanbul stock exchange. The spokesman of Nasdaq declined to comment.

The Nasdaq OMX Group, Inc. and World Steel Exchange Marketing, LLC announced a strategic partnership to develop financially settled steel and steel scrap futures products to be traded on the NASDAQ OMX Futures Exchange, Inc. This strategic partnership will help the steel industry better manage steel price risk, with a world-class trading platform and a complement of steel futures products. The products are expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2013 following filing with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. These new futures contracts will be financially-settled monthly against WSEM's SteelBenchmarker(TM) Pricing System and listed on NFX, a public futures exchange which gives institutional investors an efficient and secure way to trade steel. Transparent and regular pricing will allow market participants to manage their risk on short-, medium- and long-term contracts. Investors interested in exchange-traded steel futures will benefit from a forward price curve to judge hedging opportunities, which also allows for timing flexibility on forward price commitments. NFX will offer improved contact performance with no defaults on exchange cleared trading.