- Stock Exchange Eyes Emerging Technologies to Drive Growth
The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) is considering the use of some major emerging technologies to further deepen investors’ participation and enhance the efficiencies of products and services in the stock market.
Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Mr Oscar Onyema, said while the Exchange had deployed advanced technologies that place it at the same level with global exchanges, there are plans to deploy new emerging technologies that would further deepen the market.
Speaking at the 4th edition of the NSE-Bloomberg CEO Roundtable in Lagos, Onyema said the NSE plans to be at the forefront of the Nigeria’s advancement in the world’s fourth industrial revolution.
“In order to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the fourth industrial revolution, the Exchange is investigating the market potential of key emerging technologies in order to deploy solutions which will empower a larger proportion of the populace to access the capital market and unlock efficiencies in product and service delivery for capital market operators,” Onyema said.
He noted that the theme of the roundtable: Reshaping the Nigerian Economy for Sustainable Growth: Leveraging the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a Catalyst for Advancement, provided opportunity to examine the present state of Nigerian economy as well as share ideas on the fourth industrial revolution and its implications for the Nigerian economy.
According to him, this year’s roundtable was designed not only to discuss frameworks for economic turnaround, but explore how to position the Nigerian economy for sustained growth.
He noted that most of the world’s developed economies have begun to adapt to the fourth industrial revolution, which has integrated digital, physical and even biological technologies, with clear impacts on unlocking latent economic value, with far-reaching effects that have led to disruption of certain industries and creation of new ones.
“The opportunity the fourth industrial revolution presents is unlike any other, as the barriers to entry are low, with an upside that is vast and yet to be quantified. At the Exchange, we consider ourselves to be a forward-thinking securities exchange, and have since begun the advancement of our offerings with the assistance of technology,” Onyema said.
In 2013, the NSE launched X-Gen, its next generation trading platform and catalyst for boosting trading in Africa. On the back of this, it introduced TradeSmart, a mobile trading technology that enables investors to conveniently buy, sell and monitor their investments.
Onyema said the Exchange has embraced cloud-based technologies by building its own Data Centre to provide a number of services ranging from cloud computing, storage and database offering, networking, and management tools among others.
He added that the Exchange had also acquired SMARTS, a robust market surveillance technology with Artificial Intelligence to monitor and prevent marker abuse by fraudsters.
“This technology helps NSE to proactively forestall market manipulation, spoofing etc. This has elevated the investor protection systems at the NSE to the same level as the exchanges in the Intermarket Surveillance Group (ISG), a global organization which monitors for manipulative and fraudulent market practices, and shares information between international members,” Onyema said.
