Colombo firm powers Nairobi Stock Exchange

Live trading began at Nairobi Stock Exchange on September 11 using a system developed by Millennium Information Technologies (MillenniumIT), Sri Lanka MillenniumIT said in a statement that it took the company only five months to develop, test and implement this system.

“In the first day alone the difference in moving from a manual system to an automated trading system has given us astounding results,” said Chris Mwebesa, Chief Executive Officer of the NSE. “On September 11, when the system went live, we had 3,761 trades compared to 759 trades recorded on September 12, 2005. This is a very encouraging start.”

The NSE is ranked 4th in terms of trading volumes and 5th in terms of Market Capitalization as a percentage of GDP amongst African Stock Exchanges, as at December 2005.

MillenniumIT said it believes that its unique suite of software for the securities industry – along with the company’s newly patented software tool, Business Innovation-Dynamically (BID), the first of its kind in the world – will make a big difference in the success of the NSE.

"We are excited about being able to ‘partner’ with African stock exchanges.

“The application deployed at the NSE is the same as the applications deployed in the North American markets. It is an extremely scaleable application capable of executing 100,000 trades a day or even 10 million trades per day,” says Tony Weeresinghe, CEO of Millennium Information Technologies.

He added that, “with more African exchanges using our platform, the African dream of being one unified exchange to trade in any place is now getting closer to reality".

Two years ago, MillenniumIT deployed the Central Securities Depository in Kenya, which is tightly integrated with the launched automated trading system at the NSE. MillenniumIT also already powers exchanges in Mauritius and Ghana and is implementing a sytem in Tanzania.