Broker-friendly portal is new mantra for bourses

Competition has spurred stock exchanges to enhance the user-friendliness of their member portals.

A member portal provides a Web-enabled interface between the trading members and the exchange to facilitate certain day-to-day operations including billing, compliances, submission of applications, clearing and settlement and collateral management among other features. The aim being to steadily graduate to paperless transactions, optimise response time for the exchange by saving man hours whilst providing flexibility and convenience to members.

However, instead of outsourcing its development to technology partners, exchanges are opting to develop the same in-house and tweak it according to the feedback received from their members.

SIGN-ON ACCESS

The NSE, for instance, recently come out with several self-help features for its customer service portal and issued letters to its individual broker members informing them of the same and seeking their feedback.

The new features include a single sign-on access provided with an administrator login which has rights to create, modify, delete user ids and assign roles, the facility to directly handle all password reset requests without having to request it from the exchange.

Brokers registered with the NSE would now also be able to take advantage of “NSE Assist” which has been integrated with its member portal. Launched in September 2011, NSE Assist is an additional channel of communication between members and the exchange that enables members to login their queries, monitor its progress and also allows members to give their feedback on quality and speed of resolution.

Furthermore information such as billing download summary, margins and collateral summary and alerts on dates for various compliance submissions to create a reminder mechanism would now be available to the members with a click.

Head of Business Development, NSE, Ravi Varanasi said: “The idea was to integrate all customer service features under one umbrella for the convenience of the brokers.”

Similarly the BSE, which caters to its 1,500-strong members, boasts of providing features such as electronic filing system, unique client code, electronic contract notes, extranet, real time risk management system, collateral module and LEIPS (Liquidity Enhancement Incentives Programme) on its member portal.

MCX-SX FOLLOWS SUIT

The latest entrant on the equity exchange block, MCX-SX too is in the process of fine-tuning its present member portal called ‘My Exchange’ for the benefit of its existing 751 members and also gearing up to cope with its upcoming equity platform launch.

MCX spokesperson said: “We launched ‘My Exchange’ a couple of months back. We will continue to review feedback and add more features to this interface for greater convenience of our members.”

As of now ‘My Exchange’ which was launched on May 24 facilitates submission of online application for registration of Authorised Persons, access information relating to margins, obligations and collaterals and placement of request for release of collaterals.