The Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) has completed upgrading its Automated Trading System (ATS) in a move that will see the bourse’s disrupted trading sessions become a thing of the past.
The upgraded platform, which will be used by all investment banks and stockbrokers, went live on Monday 14th October after CDSC migrated all data belonging to investment banks, into the new system.
The new system allows linkage between the back-office operations of stockbrokers with the registry and automated trading system run by the Central Depository and Settlement Corporation (CDSC) and the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) respectively.
When fully operational, the new system is expected to minimize stockbrokers’ behind-the-scenes malpractices, including unauthorized selling of clients’ shares.
The current version of the trading system was set up in 2006. Mr Odundo Wednesday said the bourse is now upgrading to the latest available version, although he did not disclose the cost of the upgrade.
The NSE has in the past blamed some of the hitches on the fact that its trading system is coupled with the CDSC platform, meaning that any problem on either affects trading.
“This will allow us to trade new products and reduce the dependency risk we have in the coupled environment in the system with the depository,” he said.
Apart from the upgrade, the exchange plans to go slow on further capital expenditure and instead concentrate on pushing for the uptake of existing and new products and attract new listings to end the initial public offerings drought in the market.
Introduction of Automated trading was introduced at the NSE in 2006, to make it easy to audit trail in the trading process, effectively sealing loopholes used by rogue market players.
In the new platform, purchases or selling of shares, including payments and receipts of cash on similar shares by stockbrokers and investment bankers are automatically tracked by regulators.
RELATED;
