What are the technology trends that are prevalent in the stockbroking sector?
Today, mobility has become the buzzword in stockbroking. It has been launched as a service by various brokerages. However, no financial institution or brokerage sees it as a revenue stream or focus area for the business.
With better access to mobile devices like smartphones an increasing number of customers will be attracted to mobile trading. This is a medium with which brokerages can go beyond the limited market as the penetration of mobile devices is huge even in rural areas.
Mobile-based trading will be taken up by Gen Y and that’s when the actual trading and business on this platform would occur.
As a technology vendor, how Dion is leveraging this opportunity?
For all of our products, we are building a mobile interface so that the end customer can access those products through a mobile handset and conduct trading on the go. Secondly, we are integrating our solutions. For example, if we are providing three products, instead of having three different interfaces, all of them can be accessed through one interface. We have a product called M-trades that’s exclusively meant for mobile trading.
We are now getting into the core trading system of the brokers, providing them with complete solutions for trading. We are offering integrated solutions that combine products developed in house and those sourced through strategic alliances.
How do you intend to tap the rural market?
The rural market has tremendous growth potential in India as it is largely untapped. Retail participation is on the lower side since awareness about products is weak. We are helping brokerages promote the concept of online trading, which helps them reduce the dependency on branches, manpower and concomitant infrastructure.
Will Cloud computing help brokerages?
As Cloud computing becomes more popular, there would be more initiatives from the government to initiate and endorse this concept for the stockbroking sector as well.
We are working with a lot of Cloud providers. At the moment, we have some solutions that are Cloud-enabled. Having said that, as of now, there are no solutions which are working on public Cloud in the Indian brokerage sector due to the potential risks involved.
What next generation technologies are you looking at?
As of now, people are looking towards technologies such as HTML5. We are also evaluating such technologies in order to make their benefits available to the industry.