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.