Indian equity mkts get Citi touch

“Citi is proud to bring the next generation of messaging standard to India in collaboration with the NSE. It is designed to improve the efficiency of India’s equity markets while bringing together our global capabilities under a single platform,” Citi’s Head of India Equity Technology,Kumar Goradia,said in a statement here.

The internationally recognised standard FIX has been extensively tested by Citigroup for the last six-months in collaboration with NSE,the first exchange to implement this protocol in India.

“Support for FIX is an important part of NSE’s efforts to improve throughput and efficiency of pre-trade message processing. We expect the use of FIX messages to become widespread in all market segments. We congratulate Citi on being the first to go live with FIX in India,” NSE’s Vice President,New Products,Vidhu Shekhar,said.

With the successful implementation of this standard,Citigroup Global Markets can now deploy new trading technologies in India for its institutional trading clients quicker and at lower costs.

Indian exchanges introduced electronic trading around 15-years ago using proprietary data standards for interfacing with broker trading systems. NSE calls its native protocol Computer to Computer Link (CTCL).

Recognising industry needs and at the behest of global brokerages such as Citigroup,NSE commenced development of a FIX API as an alternative to the native CTCL.