Against the backdrop of a nearly four-hour outage at the National Stock Exchange last month, an RBI article on Friday suggested allowing trading of benchmarks Nifty and Sensex on all stock exchanges. Trading was halted at the NSE for nearly four hours on February 24, reportedly due to telecom links failure leading to unavailability of the online risk management system of the NSE Clearing Ltd (NCL). NCL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NSE, is responsible for clearing and settlement of all trades executed on the exchange, according to the article.
The National Stock Exchange (NSE) on Monday said failure of telecom links as well as that of storage area network system led to the outage last month and that steps are being taken to address the issues. Between primary and NDR (Near Disaster Recovery) sites, NSE said it has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy. In a detailed statement on the outage that happened on February 24, the bourse said various measures have been taken and others are under implementation to address the issues.
While most brokers have upgraded their backend systems to trade, their front-end systems have not been upgraded. They are not compliant with Sebi's interop circular of November 2018 and no one seems to be either aware of this, nor has anything been done about it so far, explains Debashis Basu.
It is mystifying how the NSE, a near-monopoly, gets protection, as the February 24 episode shows, when it is competition and accountability that should be the regulatory objective, says Debashis Basu.