Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Tuesday formally announced the launch of a ’New Trading & Surveillance System (NTS), containing 86 real-time alerts and 105 reports with a processing speed of 100,000 trades per second.
“It is a highly advanced, state-of-the-art and cutting edge system having high scalability and low latency with enhanced safety and reliability features,” a news release said.
The high-performance trading system can process 2,000 orders per second or 4 million orders per day on current servers and capacity can be enhanced 100 times by simply adding more servers.
Its order processing latency is 2 milliseconds in active–active DR configuration. Moreover, the trading system has constant availability with automatic fail-over completed within 10 seconds and a local disaster recovery switching time of less than 10 minutes.
NTS a big-data-based system that integrates, processes and analysis massive amounts of data and has efficient real-time precaution supervision functionality enabling automated early warnings & detection, visualized on-site analysis, and digital process flow.
The scientific monitoring indicator system incorporated in the surveillance system has 130 synthetic alerts and five (5) sets of intelligent analysis indicators adding that the intelligent analysis function enables high frequency time series matching, trade replay, multidimensional analysis, front-running identification, and market manipulating intelligent screening.
Similarly, for the launch of NTS, two final Grand Mocks were conducted on 27 & 29 April 2023, post the first Grand Mock held on 21 March 2023. The mock sessions were successful in that no major observations were reported.
Subsequently, the Pakistan Stock Brokers Association (PSBA)/ Representative Committee (RC) expressed their comfort in the new trading system. The relevant stakeholders including the SECP, PSBA and all TRECHs also assured their support for the new system to Go-Live on 15 May 2023. In line with this, the PSX Board of Directors, on 11 May 2023, gave the go-ahead for the system to Go-Live on 15 May 2023.
The PSX team conducted six (6) mock sessions Pre Go-Live. However, the system remained available for brokers for daily testing since September 2022 and multiple awareness sessions were held to educate and train brokers and other stakeholders by PSX cross-functional project teams on the overall functionality of the NTS.
PSX cross-functional support teams were also formed which delivered help, support and customer facilitation for which they were duly trained.
The PSX Board secured the acquisition of this system as the best possible solution for the capital market of Pakistan and the competitive bidding process involved the issuance of RFP.
This was followed by proposals from nine (9) interested parties. Four (4) bidders including Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), London Stock Exchange (LSEG), NASDAQ, and Euronext were shortlisted as per the criteria outlined. SZSE was finalised after careful evaluation and numerous presentations of the technical and financial feasibility of the System.
