Online brokering has caused huge shifts in individual investor relations with brokers. The year 1999 was clearly the year of online investor. Today, information is freely available and one can act quickly. Therefore, there has been a much wider participation. In India, older as well as current systems lack transparency and carry price inefficiencies. Then, in came the Securities Exchange Board of India with a view to encourage Net trading.

Today, we have screen-based trading as opposed to traditional systems and extension to the Net has already begun. In the future, we will have IPOs (initial public offering) and submission of applications on the Net, which will be very exciting.

E-brokering will be in full bloom with Sebi allowing Internet trading on order routing mechanism which will result in reduction in transaction costs.

Mr Raja predicted, "We will witness proliferation of personal financial sites, consolidation of various players, shift towards online brokering,

dematerialisation of scrips and transactions volumes going up to the tune of Rs 10,000-Rs 20000 crore per day (BSE and NSE put together) by the end of 2000."

Brokers will be able to check availability of funds, shares, credit limits among other features online. However, some of the major issues that need to be attended to fast are: educating the investor, bandwidth crunch, creating an inter-bank payment gateway and the legalities involved.