Indian stock exchange taps data analytics

The National Stock Exchange of India is tapping data analytics to drive efficiencies and generate insights from multiple data sources in its regulatory functions.

Besides providing a trading platform, clearing and settlement services, indices and a market data feed, the Mumbai-based company is responsible for compliance monitoring of about 1,100 trading members and 2,000 listed companies.

Its regulatory activities include enacting by-laws, rules and regulations relating to member registration, securities listing and compliance, market surveillance and investigation, as well as inspection and enforcement.

To help its regulatory teams make informed decisions, NSE recently deployed Qlik’s analytics platform to integrate data from numerous databases, including trading data, clearing and settlement data, reporting by members, risk management services and client data.

Using the Qlik Associative Engine, NSE can make associations from multiple datasets, enabling it to generate insights from all their data collectively and run comprehensive reporting for regulatory purposes. The insights are built into dashboards, through which NAB can be quickly alerted on risk areas. 

“Data utilisation is very important for NSE. We wanted to be able to have a single view of our data and be able to analyse it very intuitively,” said Dinesh Kumar Soni, senior vice-president of NSE’s regulatory group.

“With Qlik, we have been able to integrate our data on a single platform, reduce the time taken for reporting and quickly identify risk areas. The technology supports our teams so that they can concentrate on the actions they need to take rather than spending time putting data together and generating reports,” he added.

NSE said the Qlik platform has also made it faster to integrate and load data. Manual tasks that took three to six hours can now be completed within 30 minutes, enabling regulatory teams to speed up data analysis and make better decisions.

Qlik has also empowered non-technical NSE team members to create and use their own reports with no-code capabilities and natural language processing.

“Qlik enables the team to process large volume of data from multiple sources swiftly. The best part of implementing the Qlik platform is seeing how users can interact with data using dynamic visualisations. We can look at the data from a bird’s eye view or single data points with a few simple clicks. This empowers our teams to draw meaningful inferences and make smarter decisions,” Soni added.

Varun Babbar, managing director of Qlik India, noted that “customers like NSE are testament to the strength of our platform in bringing data together and being able to utilise it for fine-tuning decisions and business processes”.

According to IDC, spending on big data and analytics in India grew by 11.5% in 2021 as more organisations look to harness data to improve customer satisfaction and enhance productivity and performance. The financial industry accounted for the lion’s share of that spending, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 13.7% from 2020 to 2025.

Sharad Kotagi, market analyst at IDC Asia-Pacific, noted that enterprises have realised the potential of intelligence technologies – such as big data analytics and artificial intelligence – and are focused on building new decision environments based on data-driven insights.

“The Covid-19 crisis has further accelerated the demand for intelligence technologies to enable new ways of working,” he said.