TMX Group's $800-Million MEMX Bet Marks the End of Canada-First Strategy
John McKenzie spent his first two years as TMX Group CEO explaining why the Toronto Stock Exchange still mattered to Canadian capital. By year three, he stopped trying. The $800-million MEMX acquisition, finalized in early 2025, was the clearest signal yet that the future revenue wouldn't come from persuading pension funds to list on the TSX-V or from cheering on the next batch of junior mining stocks. It would come from owning a piece of the American equities infrastructure that processes billions of shares a day.
MEMX, Members Exchange, was born in 2019 as a consortium play. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Citadel Securities all kicked in capital to build an exchange that could undercut the Big Three (NYSE, Nasdaq, Cboe) on transaction fees. By 2024, MEMX held roughly 3% of U.S. equities market share and had quietly become the fourth-largest options venue by volume. Small in absolute terms. Large enough to matter if you controlled it.
TMX bought that control for roughly $800 million. Not a bolt-on. A bet.
The domestic ceiling became visible years ago
The Canadian listing market peaked in early 2022 and hasn't recovered. Mining and energy still represent over 40% of the TSX's total market cap, which means the exchange's fortunes rise and fall with commodity cycles and the willingness of exploration companies to go public. IPO volume has been weak for three consecutive years. The TSX-V, once a reliable generator of speculative activity, processed 47 new listings in the first half of 2025, down from over 100 in comparable periods a decade earlier.
TMX could have defended that turf harder. Built out crypto infrastructure. Lobbied for listing rule changes. Instead, McKenzie looked at the math and concluded that transaction fees from stock trading were becoming a commodity business, and the Canadian market was too small to generate the recurring data revenue that now drives margin at the major global exchanges. The answer wasn't a better TSX. The answer was a different revenue base entirely.
That shift started with VettaFi, the index and ETF analytics platform TMX acquired in 2024. VettaFi brought high-margin subscription revenue and positioning in the U.S. asset management world. MEMX adds execution to that chain. TMX now controls parts of the entire lifecycle: index creation through VettaFi, trading through MEMX, clearing and data feeds through its proprietary stack. None of it requires a single new Canadian listing.
Buying the consortium meant buying the relationships
MEMX wasn't just technology. The founding members, Citadel, Virtu, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, are the firms that determine where the bulk of U.S. retail and institutional flow gets routed. Owning MEMX gives TMX a seat at that table. Not as a vendor pitching services, but as the infrastructure provider those firms helped design.
That matters in ways the headline deal value doesn't capture. When Citadel or Virtu routes an order, they route it to venues they trust and, increasingly, venues they helped build. TMX didn't just buy market share. It bought insurance that its platform would stay in the flow as execution standards tighten and as the SEC continues pushing for transparency in order routing.
The trade-off is visible in the domestic numbers. TMX's Canadian-sourced revenue growth has been flat since 2023. U.S. and international revenue now represents close to half the top line, a figure that will cross 60% once MEMX contributions fully consolidate in 2026. The company still operates the TSX. It just doesn't pretend that's where the growth is.
Some Canadian market participants see this as abandonment. A national exchange operator that stops investing in the national market. McKenzie's counter is that TMX was never a public service. It's a for-profit entity that happens to run critical infrastructure, and the profit is increasingly American. The tension between those two roles used to be manageable when the domestic business was growing. It isn't anymore.
John McKenzie spent his first two years as TMX Group CEO explaining why the Toronto Stock Exchange still mattered to Canadian capital. By year three, he stopped trying. The $800-million MEMX acquisition, finalized in early 2025, was the clearest signal yet that the future revenue wouldn't come from persuading pension funds to list on the TSX-V or from cheering on the next batch of junior mining stocks. It would come from owning a piece of the American equities infrastructure that processes billions of shares a day.
MEMX, Members Exchange, was born in 2019 as a consortium play. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Citadel Securities all kicked in capital to build an exchange that could undercut the Big Three (NYSE, Nasdaq, Cboe) on transaction fees. By 2024, MEMX held roughly 3% of U.S. equities market share and had quietly become the fourth-largest options venue by volume. Small in absolute terms. Large enough to matter if you controlled it.
TMX bought that control for roughly $800 million. Not a bolt-on. A bet.
The domestic ceiling became visible years ago
The Canadian listing market peaked in early 2022 and hasn't recovered. Mining and energy still represent over 40% of the TSX's total market cap, which means the exchange's fortunes rise and fall with commodity cycles and the willingness of exploration companies to go public. IPO volume has been weak for three consecutive years. The TSX-V, once a reliable generator of speculative activity, processed 47 new listings in the first half of 2025, down from over 100 in comparable periods a decade earlier.
TMX could have defended that turf harder. Built out crypto infrastructure. Lobbied for listing rule changes. Instead, McKenzie looked at the math and concluded that transaction fees from stock trading were becoming a commodity business, and the Canadian market was too small to generate the recurring data revenue that now drives margin at the major global exchanges. The answer wasn't a better TSX. The answer was a different revenue base entirely.
That shift started with VettaFi, the index and ETF analytics platform TMX acquired in 2024. VettaFi brought high-margin subscription revenue and positioning in the U.S. asset management world. MEMX adds execution to that chain. TMX now controls parts of the entire lifecycle: index creation through VettaFi, trading through MEMX, clearing and data feeds through its proprietary stack. None of it requires a single new Canadian listing.
Buying the consortium meant buying the relationships
MEMX wasn't just technology. The founding members, Citadel, Virtu, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, are the firms that determine where the bulk of U.S. retail and institutional flow gets routed. Owning MEMX gives TMX a seat at that table. Not as a vendor pitching services, but as the infrastructure provider those firms helped design.
That matters in ways the headline deal value doesn't capture. When Citadel or Virtu routes an order, they route it to venues they trust and, increasingly, venues they helped build. TMX didn't just buy market share. It bought insurance that its platform would stay in the flow as execution standards tighten and as the SEC continues pushing for transparency in order routing.
The trade-off is visible in the domestic numbers. TMX's Canadian-sourced revenue growth has been flat since 2023. U.S. and international revenue now represents close to half the top line, a figure that will cross 60% once MEMX contributions fully consolidate in 2026. The company still operates the TSX. It just doesn't pretend that's where the growth is.
Some Canadian market participants see this as abandonment. A national exchange operator that stops investing in the national market. McKenzie's counter is that TMX was never a public service. It's a for-profit entity that happens to run critical infrastructure, and the profit is increasingly American. The tension between those two roles used to be manageable when the domestic business was growing. It isn't anymore.
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