Exchanges play an important role in fostering the nation’s economic growth by enabling efficient risk management platform to the stakeholders. A holistic trading environment should offer participants predictability, integrity, market support and liquidity. Exchanges in the past have employed a very traditional and conservative approach to business, to the process of making business decisions and by extension the technology we employ to run the business.

Our challenge is to marry the traditional and conservative sector with the innovation culture that is all around us. Technology is enabling the transformation of financial markets, knowledge is becoming globalised, access is becoming easier, implementation is becoming cheaper, and Technology innovation is fuelling the rate of the change in the financial markets. Digitization is bringing in diverse and large participants from many walks of life, both informed and demanding clients. Not only do we have increasingly better-informed clients but an increasingly more active regulators. The regulatory rules are welcome at Exchanges however the costs to be compliant are getting higher and higher. The costs are measured in money and the time devoted to being compliant.

I view the technology we operate as underpinning of our brand, the perception of our technology affects the perception of our brand. It facilitates and enables our business. If the business wants to be modern,agile and relevant then so does the technology we employ. Let the technology be the enabler and not the restrictor. Technology innovation, often led by small independent specialist companies, is a very exciting movement.

Technology leaders are adopting more agile working methods and keep an open,investigative mind to technological change and, with this change, new methods of implementation. The over-riding interest is to deliver a blue-chip service hand in hand with front line technology advances. Of course, this is easier said than done. Regulators now demand more from the industry as well, and have started to adopt new technologies that will revolutionise their ability to collect and analyse information. Especially since the financial crash, the global regulators of markets have taken the lessons and looked at how they can avoid the failures of the past. Certainly, areas such as client leverage, market surveillance, price transparency, transaction reporting and KYC

are all in clear view. All of which are positive and in many ways come naturally to the structure of the exchange. The regulators within India are looking to inject more market forces into the exchange world by opening competition between the exchanges. Agility is required here to be able to serve a wider market. Regulators the world over have looked to exchanges to move into traditional OTC spaces such as fixed income derivatives and underlying assets. Our ability to apply our technology to different asset classes is crucial as is our ability to functionally differentiate our offering. These considerations then become key drivers in the technology choices we make.

Exchanges operate large mission critical networks with endless volumes of sensitive information, and that puts them in the crosshairs of cyber-attacks having large data

Here is the right time to move into the new world of FinTech fusion if not one is already there. Having run a traditional technology approach, we are now willingly adopting the newer and leading edge technologies through investment and rapid prototyping. Instead of just resting on our legacy laurels, financial organizations are both investigating and employing new technologies & work methods that are agile and adaptive like DevOps. So, what does the future hold? So, what's the next step? An agile focused management structure. Firstly, it must be to have an organizational structure and backdrop that is open to innovative ideas, invest in technology incubation, and enhance the decision-making process. Empowering employees to make decisions will reduce the time to begin projects enabling rapid prototyping with success or fail-fast-forward mode, giving us agility to respond to market needs and regulatory changes in preemptive manner.

Block chain or more precisely the distributed ledger technology(DLT)is the hot buzz word on the international stage and we do spend time considering the use cases within Exchange’s environment. The international focus is how it could be used to replace the very core of the financial market infrastructure. We look close to home and are examining if it's a technology that could help bring transparency and traceability into areas such as KYC, Clearing and Settlement activities.

We also see that the adoption of the cloud has increasingly becoming the mode of delivery and deployment. Almost all have begun some of technology initiatives in that direction to leverage off the huge investments made by big players like AWS and Azure.Having extensive infrastructures available to us on demand will be a game changer for our cost base and ability to scale quickly. The advances in big data storage,cloud compute,analytics and visualisation lend themselves to our business. We now have the easy access to vast real time data sets which only aides improving the transparency of the market and management decisions. Data on demand also permits us to deliver effective training and educational programs that could not have been considered without this advancement.

Exchanges operate large mission critical networks with endless volumes of sensitive information, and that puts them in the cross hairs of cyber-attacks having large data centres, most number of transactions, and high risk exposure from IT security & regulatory compliance risk. It is vital that we invest in personnel,processes and technology to understand, monitor and prevent the breaches given the evolving nature of cyber threats.

All of this needs to have the commitment to do things differently,to break from the old mould and from the competition. It certainly can put decision makers in unfamiliar territory but it is what the modern-day business must embrace. Personally,it leaves me slavishly sifting through media channels for the current and next important thing in capital markets, excited about the possibilities but slightly paranoid I’ve missed something.