April 19, 2012 / NSE / Temple ASAJU, Proshare News Editor

The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) will be signing on the trading system of the multinational financial services powerhouse, NASDAQ OMX System as it embarks on upgrading its current Trading Platform to the cutting-edge NASDAQ X-Stream- a high performance, robust and scalable, multi-asset, multi-market matching trading engine. The event is expected to have top personalities from the Nigerian ICT sector and NASDAQ OMX International Chiefs in attendance and billed to take place in Lagos on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at The Exchange.
 

The official signing of the contract with NASDAQ OMX to provision a new Trading Platform for The Exchange will be a major milestone in ushering in a new way of conducting business in the Nigerian Capital market.
 

This development is an affirmation of the assurances given by Adeolu Bajomo, Executive Director, Market Operations and Technology (MOT) in an exclusive chat with Proshare in September 2011 (NSE Transformation on Course, Leverages Technology to Deliver ) where he said “we want to bring a very strong powerful matching engine for quite a number of reasons. We need to introduce new products and we need to have a system and a trading engine which allows us to introduce new products in a very flexible manner and a very responsive manner one that will allow us take those products to the market in a very quick robust process”. 
 

Watch Video of Mr Bajomo in September 2011:
The New Nigerian Stock Exchange Adeolu Bajomo  

Executive Director, Market Operations and Technology (MOT) of The Exchange, Mr Adeolu Bajomo explaining the background to the project said that a little over a year ago, NASDAQ OMX, along with two other global exchanges, responded to The NSE’s proposal to provide a market leading Trading Platform for the bourse. The NSE undertook a detailed and robust evaluation process, leading to the selection of NASDAQ OMX X-Stream system, currently used by over 20 exchanges around the world and reputed to be one of the leading trading platforms in the market.
 

According to Bajomo, The NSE and NASDAQ OMX performed a joint design study between September and November 2010 and in July 2011, covering requirements, project timeline and risks system components; servers and connectivity; installation, training, testing and go live support among other issues. The NSE Technology Chief spoke of the project objectives: “X-stream will replace the current trading system, Horizon.  Equities, and fully functional Bond Market, and ETFs will come in phase one and the introduction of Derivatives to The Exchange will come in the second phase”.
 

He spoke further: “Implementation of a new trading platform is one of the key cornerstones in delivering the full potential of our market, affording us the tools to deliver our target of five products in five years, scale up our services for growth and enhance the investor experience of doing business in the Nigerian Capital market.
 

The new system will also improve transparency and provide efficient price discovery”.
 

The platform, will among others, enable investors, through their brokers to have real-time access to market prices, their portfolios and execute market orders in near real-time from anywhere and on a wide range of devices including smartphones.