By Opeyemi Issa InvestAdvocate

Lagos (INVESTADVOCATE)-Oscar Onyema, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) Tuesday said its NASDAQ X-Stream trading platform a project put at a cost of $2 million will become operational in the Second Quarter (Q2) of year 2013.

Onyema said this at the signing ceremony of upgrading the NSE Trading Platform to NASDAQ X-Stream with NASDAQ OMX at the Stock Exchange House in Lagos Nigeria.

“The Trading Platform upgrade is a strategic move and a significant step in achieving the target of making the NSE “The Gateway to the African Markets and the cost of the project is about $2 million and would become operational in the second quarter of 2013” Onyema said.

The NSE CEO said NASDAQ X-Stream is a cutting-edge, high performance, robust and scalable, multi-asset, multi-market matching Trading Engine said to be the fastest Trading Engine in Africa.

According to him, the new Trading Platform will enable the NSE have the fastest Trading Engine in Africa and investors, through their Stockbrokers, will have real-time access to Market prices, their portfolios and be enabled to execute Market orders in near real-time from anywhere and on a wide range of devices including Smartphones.

He further affirmed that the new system would improve transparency and provide efficient price discovery in the Market, among other benefits, “investors in the Market would benefit significantly from the system upgrade as it would afford them the opportunity to diversify their investment portfolio” the NSE CEO said.

“With this new system, Equities, a fully functional Bond Market and Exchange Traded Funds ( ETFs) will be accommodated in phase one of the project while Derivatives will be introduced in the second phase. The System will also enable The NSE to host other Exchanges” Onyema said.

On their part, Sandy Frucher, Vice Chairman of NASDAQ OMX, and Lars Ottersgard, President, Market Technology of the Company, signed on behalf of NASDAQ while the Onyema and Adeolu, Bajomo, Executive Director, Market Operation and Technology, signed on behalf of Nigeria’s Exchange.

According to Bajomo, the process of selecting the new trading platform was a rather rigorous one for the NSE. “We undertook a detailed and robust evaluation process that culminated in the selection of NASDAQ OMX X-Stream, a system currently used by over 94 Exchanges around the world and reputed to be one of the leading trading platforms in the Market” he said.

Bajomo further affirmed that the Nigeria’s Exchange and NASDAQ OMX carried out a joint design analysis between September and November 2010 and in July 2011 which covered issues ranging from project timeline, risks system components, servers and connectivity; installation, training and testing to go-live support.

On his part, Frucher, Vice Chairman of NASDAQ OMX congratulated the NSE for the project. According to him, the idea of partnering with NASDAQ OMX by the present management of Nigeria’s Exchange is an aggressive one and that of an Exchange that wants to survive, “the agenda has opportunities for the Nigerian people” Frucher said.

Frucher said that his company is a strong brand in the business and believes in partnership “the the success of Nigeria’s Exchange in this project, is the success of NASDAQ OMX” he said.