Reliance on IT

A diversified financial services group with a pan India presence, Religare
Enterprises has customer focused financial products and services targeted at
retail investors, high net worth individuals and corporate and institutional
clients.

Religare operates out of seven domestic regional offices, forty-three
sub-regional offices with presence in 498 cities.

ITs Brokering Business

Like most other broking companies, Religare too has deployed certain bread
and butter applications like order management, risk management and order routing
which are the basic components of daily trading.

GN Nagaraj, CTO Religare Enterprises Trade anywhere anytime engine allows customers to do business on other exchanges

Elaborating GN Nagaraj, CTO, Religare Enterprises says that the order routing
management validates orders after they are punched in. Orders are also accepted
on the Internet (for retail customers who only do trading as a day job) and a
closed user group (CUG), offering a mix of leased line,VSAT, and VPN line
connections for frequent users.

After validating order in a correct format, the order is passed to the risk
management system which further checks whether the customers account have
enough funds to cover risks of this order after which the order is passed to the
relevant trading exchange. After the order is executed, the exchange reports
back, which subsequently gets updated through order management on the dealer
terminal.

At the end of day, reports are mailed back to the customer with details about
the orders traded including opening and closing balance trading reports.

Customer Handling

Religare has deployed an ancillary system in reporting to create customer
portfolio and offer niche services including issuing advisory for trading and
market intelligence.

For attending to customer queries, Religare has also deployed CRM and a
unified communications system. "A customer can choose to contact us by any
communication modeletter, emails, telephone. A unified architecture helps us to
collate all this customer data together and then pull out relevant information
as and when required to have a look," says Nagaraj.

Trading in IT

On the trading side, Religare uses a trading engine, Trade anywhere
anytime developed by Religare Technova enabling brokers to achieve break-neck
speed on order routing and processing.

In addition, Religare also uses Fast Trade, a next generation trading engine
on Microsoft and Java technology, bringing new life to the trading terminals.

Nagaraj says the Trade anywhere anytime engine allows customers to do
business on other exchanges, that is if there is a network of other trading
exchanges of the world, the trading terminals can connect to this network using
FIX protocol and trade on these exchanges.

The Year Gone By

Following others, Religare too has implemented algorithmic trading
facilitating trading for those who do trading as a day job and not as a full
time activity. "We have implemented algorithmic trading, wherein certain
formulas are created which get triggered automatically when a market reaches a
certain point, therefore the order gets released automatically. However, I would
like to clarify here that these formulas are generally used by people who like
to extrapolate on the future," adds Nagaraj.

The company has also implemented trading through mobiles for its retail
customers.

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in