CSE imposes trading halt

A trading halt was imposed Sri Lanka’s stock market was imposed a trading halt on Friday at 12.07 pm by the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) following a technical failure of a broker back-office system provider. 

The CSE in a media release said that the broker back-office systems are operated by independent systems vendors who provide these directly to stock broking firms. “Although the failure did not impact the operating systems of the CSE itself, it affected 14 brokers’ ability to access the stock market, thereby impacting all of their investor clients. The imposition of the halt was to ensure that a fair and orderly market is maintained where a substantial majority of investors operating through all broker firms have equal access to participation.” 

Regular trading was enabled at 12.45 p.m. immediately after the system was restored and confirmed to the CSE.

The CSE will be calling for an immediate review of the system failure of the vendor in question with a view to ensuring accelerated remediation of the causes that led to today’s incident, the release added.