By NKIRUKA NNOROM

Ahead of the take-off of the new trading platform, X-Gen, which is set to commence operation at the end of this month, the Nigerian Stock Exchange, NSE, said it has equipped stockbrokers with the requisite training necessary to familiarise them with the new trading engine.

Accordingly, over 627 stockbrokers were taken through the training which lasted for a period of two months, across various parts of the country, the NSE said in a statement jointly signed by Nwando Ajene, Head, Corporate Communications and Dante Ibidapo Martins, Head, Public Relations.

The NSE had on April 2012 signed on the multinational financial services powerhouse, NASDAQ OMX System for the upgrading of its Trading Platform to the cutting edge NASDAQ X-Stream, which is a high performance, robust and scalable, multi-assets, multi-market matching trading engine.

The NSE has argued that the new Trading Platform would provide it with the fastest trading engine in Africa and investors, through their stockbrokers would have real time access to market prices, their portfolios and be enabled to execute market orders in near real-time from anywhere and on a wide range of devices

Speaking on the new development, the Executive Director Market Operations and Technology of the Exchange, Mr Ade Bajomo, said, “The NSE organised comprehensive hands-on training sessions for member firms and their stockbrokers to get fully acquainted with the new platform as part of steps being taken to ensure a successful launch of the new trading engine.”

“From July 2013 till date, there have been over fifty-five training sessions held in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, where over 95 percent of the registered member firms have already successfully completed the training course and formally certified to use the state of the art platform. Feedback from the stockbrokers on the quality of the training has been positive and this is very important in terms of our overall readiness to cutover smoothly to the new platform,” he added.

According to him, the X-GEN opens up an unprecedented level of innovative trading capabilities for the Nigerian capital market, providing low latency trading, straight through processing from broker order management systems to the Exchange, direct market access for the buy-side and mobile access through smartphones to the retail investors, leveraging on the 120million mobile phone penetration already in the country. “As the Nigerian capital market grows and expands its vision for greater market efficiency, liquidity and transparency, we are poised to supporting its efforts through our proven trading technologies and processes,” Bajomo explained.