Single Window Advantage

From a humble beginning in 1948, LKP Securities today is a well established
and dynamic broking house in India. Known for its state-of-the-art systems and
innovative processes, LKP offers a single window advantage to its clients for
all capital and money market related activities. In a broking houses, operations
are divisble into front and back office applications. Back office applications
have till date never been integrated, and 70% of the exchange activities are
carried out in the front office related activities. Currently, all the
departments use different types of applications with no two departments using
the same.

According to Kamal Chanchalani, CIO, LKP Securities, this in turn gives rise
to a bigger issue as there are no real-time based applications that can help in
decision making. "Currently, we have introduced a new application namely Lidha
Didha for RMS and back office applications in a single office, and we are hoping
it will be the answer to our problems," he adds.

Kamal Chanchalani, CIO, LKP Securities

Challenges

Explaining the functioning at trading houses, Chanchalani says, "Basically
the main applications for stock broking houses are Microsoft based and there is
hardly anything on Open Source. We expect the best applications from vendors
since they are the ones who receive most of the feedback based on which a good
application should be designed for the trading market. Currently, one vendor is
deploying partly on Open Source."

Open Source is important because it saves a lot of costs for the business,
helps in maintaining transaction secrets which is of utmost importance, plus the
additional advantage of nil virus attacks.

Some of the major issues faced include multicast broadcast and interactive
bandwidth. "Connectivity has always been an issue for us since it adds to the
costs of the company, thus eating into the profits. And we need to address this
issue on an urgent basis. Most of our applications are windows based," explains
Chanchalani.

There are other implementation issues like the cost for installing firewall.
However, Chanchlani adds that even after installing these applications, security
of the transactions continues to be a key concern. Problem of plenty also
bothers Chanchalani with the availability of too many vendors to choose from.

He says, "Considering the amount of transactions that take place daily, there
is a need to secure the records. Since we enable holding of DP accounts and
transactions through it and offer CSDL related services, security is of
paramount importance to us. This is a totally Internet based application wherein
clients can log in using their user name and password and conduct transactions.
Offering secured application is the single biggest challenge for us."

Costs are a major challenge for any company. Explaining their IT spending
scenario, Chanchalani explains, "We have a very variable budget. Being a trading
house, our IT budget is dependent on the performance of the Indian economy and
the inflow of FIIs. Approximatley 80% of our profits were slashed by costs. The
connectivity charges, recurring costs, costs of license to Microsoft, etc."

Chanchalani says that his company intends to implement SAM Cell storage in
the future, VMWare and maybe even Open Source.

Shilpa Shanbhag

shilpas@cybermedia.co.in