National Stock Exchange of India Ltd NSE investing heavily in its technology infrastructure on a continuous basis over the last 3-4 years, has almost tripled its annual cash spend on capital and operational expenses on technology to approximately INR 900 crores. NSE’s tech initiatives are driven by a strong technology workforce of approximately 1500 plus employees and vendor staff. NSE has a robust, resilient, secure, and fault tolerant technology infrastructure supported by best in class equipment from vendors like Cisco, HP, Dell, Hitachi, Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Oracle etc. and aided by able technology service providers like TCS, Cognizant, and Wipro.
NSE has a strong technology governance process in place wherein the technology infrastructure is reviewed on a regular basis by committees like Standing Committee on Technology which has technology experts and also multiple types of audits by various firms/institutions with specialized expertise. Multiple transformational projects have been completed and are ongoing to ensure that our systems continue to be robust, resilient, secure and state of the art. NSE is the largest derivatives exchange in the world by volumes and it has a demonstrated track record of handling significantly high volumes despite a challenging external environment over the last one year due to the pandemic without any impact on trading.
Equity and equity derivatives segments’ daily average volumes have gone up by 122% and 79% respectively in 2021 compared to 2019. Average order messages per day have gone up by about 200% during the period across all segments with a peak load of over 6.5 billion order messages in a day. Further, NSE and NSE Clearing have also implemented multiple structural changes over the last two years like interoperability in a seamless manner.
NSE constantly endeavours to provide a glitch free environment. However, the complex technology architecture has significant external and vendor dependencies in terms of connectivity and hardware. It is pertinent to note that globally, in the last two years, there have been trading outages in many markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Germany and UK.
NSE has a culture of innovation and proactive investment in technology. NSE’s proprietary technology infrastructure is at par with the best in the world in terms of size, scale and throughout. The standards set by NSE in terms of market practices, products, services and technologies have become industry benchmarks.