Technical snag hits NSE; pay-in completed

Technical snag hits NSE; pay-in completed
ENS ECONOMIC BUREAU

Mumbai, March 13: The National Stock Exchange (NSE) has successfully completed the pay-in on Tuesday even as the market failed to open on the scheduled time and is likely to conduct the pay-out as scheduled on Wednesday.

NSE managing director Ravi Narain said, "The pay-in has been completed successfully although it got delayed because of the time taken by individual banks to complete the transactions."

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in a separate press release issued on Tuesday also confirmed that it has successfully completed all the pay-in and pay-out till now and the pay-in was done for settlement number 49/2001 ended March 9, 2001.

The normal market at the NSE failed to open at the schedule time of 9.55 am and remained closed till 11.30 am, due to some error in the open processing module pertaining to the normal market. The odd lot and spot market were open for trading, according to a press release from NSE.

BSE further clarified that it does not envisage any kind of payment problem in the ensuing settlement - 50/2001, the pay-in for which is due on March 15, 2001. Against the pay-in for settlement no 50/2001, the exchange has capital and margins of Rs 2,378.58 crore, which is several times in excess of the pay-in amount.

The marginable gross exposure at BSE as on March 12, 2001 stands at Rs 3455.61 crore for A, B1, B2 and Z group securities. The exchange has capital and margins to the tune of Rs 2,378.58 crore which provides a cover of nearly 68 per cent. The cash component of the total capital and margins is about 49 per cent, the BSE release said.

The market, in recent times, has been rife with rumours of payment crisis following the payment problem in the Calcutta Stock Exchange and players were expecting similar crisis in other exchanges.

The system and application error logs were immediately examined by the NSE authorities to find out the exact cause of the problem. After anexamination, it was found that one of the order-processing modules failed and this prevented the market from going successfully into the open state, NSE said.

As an immediate measure, the exchange stopped the affected process to avoid the problem and restarted it again. However, this failed to resolve the problem and it was concluded that the process could be rectified only after bringing down the application environment completely and restarting the environment. Accordingly, the NSE was closed down at 10.30 am.

The users were informed through the broadcast messages to logout and re-login after some time. The environment was made available for user logins at 11.10 am and the market was opened successfully for trading at 11.30 am with a pre-open phase of 5 minutes to facilitate order cancellations. The normal market timing was extended till 5 pm.