System hitch rocks day’s trading at the NSE, again

Trading at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) remained interrupted for the greater part of Monday as a technical hitch to the bourse systems rendered trading accounts inaccessible.

“The NSE wishes to notify market participants, investors and the general public that trading activities are currently unavailable due to technical challenges occasioned by the unavailability of connectivity to the Central Depository System (CDS),” the NSE noted in a statement.

The system outage, which saw a freeze to the trading of equities and bonds through the Automated Traded System (ATS), is the second full-scale interruption to activity at the bourse in 4 months pointing to the growing inefficiencies in the current network.

Interruption to trading at the NSE could however soon lie in the past as the exchange overhauls its trading infrastructure in a fresh round of investment.

According to NSE Chief Executive Officer Geoffrey Odundo, who described the upcoming changes soon after the previous outage on January 8, 2019, the bourse is — for an undisclosed amount — working to revamp its trading system with a completion date of June in mind.

The current ATS system was setup in 2006 and has since experienced a considerable number of outages to prompt the NSE into action to focus on overall changes to the network.

To recoup on lost trading time, the NSE extended its day trading to 5:00pm from the customary close of 3:00pm.