Dse’s New Trading Software
New board reviews procurement process tomorrow
The demutualised board of Dhaka Stock Exchange is going to review the procurement process of its new trading software worth Tk 50 crore that was earlier halted by the capital market regulator amid allegation of irregularities. The previous board had almost finalised the procurement process. But, the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission disallowed the DSE’s previous board to issue work order as Nordic Growth Market NGM AB, a Swedish stock exchange, had withdrawn itself from the software procurement process blaming that the bourse’s process of procurement as non-professional and opaque.
‘A single-agenda meeting has been arranged to review the whole procurement process as question of irregularities raised regarding the process,’ a DSE official told New Age.
The board meeting to review the process will be held tomorrow.
‘We have organised a meeting to give a detail review to the new board about the software procurement process,’ DSE managing director Swapan Kumar Bala told New Age on Sunday.
The review will include all the process from the beginning to present situation, said Bala, adding that the next action plan would be decided in the meeting.
Previous board members told New Age recently that it would be a disaster if the review process took much time to replace the existing trading system as the contract with the prevailing software vendor would expire within next six months.
The NGM chief executive officer Roger Peleback on January 22 had sent a letter to the BSEC chairman, commissioners and the MD.
‘NGM hereby wishes to announce its formal withdrawal from the procurement process. The reason for NGM’s withdrawal is that NGM considers that procurement process of DSE to be carried out in a manner which is neither professional nor transparent,’ NGM alleged.
‘NGM has in a timely manner continuously supplied the DSE with all information which has been requested in the procurement process, but the DSE has for a prolonged period of time failed to respond,’ it said.
‘This reason for NGM to suspect that the procurement process is not being handled in a completely objective manner,’ said NGM.
‘DSE’s external technical committee selected two firms — NASDAQ OMX and Millennium IT— out of four vendors for the purchase of the Matching Engine, while the other two interested firms — NGM and Financial Technology — were not given any scope to give any demonstration of their software,’ DSE sources said.
On the other hand, the external committee selected four firms out of 17 interested ones for the procurement of Order Management System, they said.
The DSE on June 10, 2012 had introduced the online-based trading system MSA Plus, which, however, had failed to cheer up the investors as its operational flaws delayed trading for one hour on two separate occasions when new companies made their debut on the bourse late 2012.
The software also had failed to execute buy and sale orders on several occasions.
Following the incidents, the BSEC had launched an investigation and found that the glitches resulted from negligence by the software vendor as well as the DSE.
Xchanging, a UK-based software vendor, had provided the software at a cost of around $0.6 million.
-With New Age input
