(Reuters) – The Australian stock exchange said the listing of online labour-for-hire marketplace Airtasker was delayed by a day due to “human error” on its part, in another setback for ASX Ltd that is under scrutiny for a market outage last year.
Airtasker, which connects customers to experts for a range of common tasks from cleaning to gardening, was slated to go public on Monday in a mooted A$255 million ($196.81 million) float, after raising A$83.7 million in an initial public offering.
The delay was due to market participants not being informed about stock admission and the trading commencement date by the normal cut-off time, which should have happened on Friday, a spokesman for ASX told Reuters in an email.
“ASX has apologised to Airtasker, regrets the disruption and has taken steps to address this as quickly as possible,” the spokesman said, adding that the ASX’s CEO spoke to his counterpart at Airtasker and the company was informed throughout.
The process of releasing information is manual because of the nature and timing of the information being handled, the spokesman added.
Airtasker did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. The company’s debut is now set for 11 a.m. local time (0000 GMT) on Tuesday.
The delay puts ASX in hot water again after an outage in November wiped nearly an entire trading session and raised questions over its technology and prompted a regulator to launch an independent probe.
The bourse said it is “reviewing what occurred very closely and will take appropriate steps to prevent it happening again”.
($1 = 1.2957 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Nikhil Kurian Nainan in Bengaluru; Editing by Amy Caren Daniel)
