BSE to launch faster feed next week

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The Bombay Stock Exchange, whose data pipelines are burdened by the need to carry pricing of more stocks than any other bourse, will next week launch a feed that is several times faster than its existing offering, a top official said.

The BSE's so-called "fastcast" technology will deliver data to brokers at 500 to 700 kilobytes per second, compared with 100 to 150 kilobytes now, Ashishkumar Chauhan, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the exchange, told the Reuters India Investment Summit on Tuesday.

The rollout of the low-latency feed targeted to algorithmic traders is part of a modernisation programme at Asia's oldest bourse under the leadership of new CEO Madhu Kannan.

It follows last week's launch of real-time pricing on the BSE's website of each of the 30 constituents of the benchmark BSE Sensitive Index, or Sensex.

"What we are trying to do is to push the envelope in the Indian market by sort of giving better, faster, what I call visible, comparable, technology improvements," said Chauhan, who joined the BSE a month ago after working as chief information officer at Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Group.

Chauhan was among the founders of the rival National Stock Exchange (NSE), and also founded Marketplace Technologies, which was acquired by the BSE this year.

The BSE, Asia's oldest bourse, is home to roughly 5,000 listed companies, the most in the world and more than three times the number listed on the NSE, according to the World Federation of Exchanges.

Still, the NSE, enjoys three times the daily turnover of the BSE this year.