Other Finalists : National Stock Exchange : Neat on the Web

Neat on the Web or NOW is a cloud-based infrastructure setup by NSE to allow
its small and medium traders to setup their own Internet based trading portals
on the Web.  If they were to setup their own trading portals, which would cater
to their specific requirements, then it would be a costly affair. Customizations
could range from provisioning for online trade analysis, risk management tools,
integration with the trading member's back-office operations, etc.

Setting up such a custom trading portal was therefore restricted only to the
bigger players. This impacted the business of the smaller players because they
couldn't offer the level of service that the bigger trading members were able to
offer. NSE deployed NOW, which is a shared web infrastructure to provide
Internet trading facility to such members.

The deployment

NOW provides access to NSE's cash segment, Futures & Options and currency
derivatives segments as well as NCDEX. The members can access these segments
over the Internet, VSAT, and leased lines.  They get complete administration
rights into this platform, a risk management tool to monitor and control their
own and their clients' trading activities, a dealer terminal for placing their
own as well as their clients' orders, and an investor trading web portal for
anytime anywhere access for execution.

Challenges faced

Several challenges had to be overcome by NSE, including convincing the
dealers to switch to this new terminal, which was hosted on a shared
infrastructure instead of being a standalone setup with the dealer. They had to
be convinced of giving up control and support from own staff since everything
moved to a centralized setup. Data privacy and confidentiality of data were
other issues that required convincing. Another common challenge was to convince
dealers that the new platform would let them create multiple risk categories
based on their client's risk profiles. Technical challenges were  reliability of
Internet connectivity, refresh speed of market data as well as speed of
execution of orders.

The results

The new platform is being offered to members for free till March 2011. At
the time of evaluating this project, NSE had 800+ members signed up for NOW, who
were processing an average of 1.2 million messages per day. The platform is
clocking an average daily turnover of Rs 10,000+ crores, and more than 15k
dealers log into it everyday.