Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Wednesday announced that its TCS BaNCS offering has been selected by Singapore Exchange (SGX) to power the NSE IFSC-SGX Connect (Gift Connect). NSE IFSC is a fully owned subsidiary of the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE).
The connect program will help the exchanges in trade execution and clearing of Nifty products on behalf of its members in Singapore and globally.
SGX has set up SGX India Connect IFSC Private Limited, a special purpose vehicle at Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (Gift City) to enable international access to Indian capital markets and create a larger liquidity pool of international and domestic participants. Gift City is a special economic zone in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
TCS said that while NSE IFSC-SGX Phase 1 will be operationalised in April 2022, the full program on which TCS is engaged, will go live in about 3-4 months.
TCS BaNCS, in a five-year contract, will be offering end-to-end solutions for its trading, clearing, settlement and risk management operations as it has proved its expertise in multi-broker and low latency capabilities. The Gift Connect will allow SGX members to place orders on NSE IFSC using FIX/proprietary APIs or through the TCS BaNCS dealing terminal.
Managements, functions
The solution’s clearing and settlement module will interact with the clearing arms of NSE IFSC and SGX for position and limits management, while also performing all regulatory compliance functions. TCS BaNCS’ offering will also have a risk management module, which SGX and SGX brokers can use to define risk rules and profiles, monitor and control trading activities.
Tinku Gupta, Senior Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer, SGX, said, “SGX will be pioneering the creation of a new trading infrastructure in Gift City, that paves the way for trading of globally popular products such as the Nifty Futures through the NSE IFSC platform. TCS BaNCS will give us a modern, fast, intuitive application interface and real-time market data feeds for trading, post-trade processing and risk management.”
R Vivekanand, Global Head, BFSI Platforms and Products, TCS, added, “TCS has played a key role in building and maintaining the technology infrastructure that underpins India’s capital markets. More than 40 per cent of trades in India run through the TCS BaNCS Trading solution. We are pleased to partner with SGX in its strategic Gift Connect program and bring our unique combination of Indian market know-how, global practices, agility and our high-performance solution to support its growth plans in India, while bringing in new capital flows from across the world.”
More Gift City projects
“We are having conversations in the BFSI space, especially in the capital markets space for Gift City, given that the jurisdiction has its advantages and there’s a different regulatory and tax regime. It is not tied to this project’s timeline, but getting to work there gives us an understanding of how things are shaping up in Gift City,” Vivekanand said answering media queries.
He added, “Additionally, we are seeing larger initiatives at Gift City as we have to create a complete financial infrastructure there which can address all types of players like industries and not just BFSI. We are having conversations about other projects, which we are expecting will take off in the next 3-4 months.”
Separately, beyond Gift City, he said that TCS is already in talks with four other market infrastructure players and projects in India. Globally, this number is nearly double that. Out of the four in India, Vivekanand hopes to get all of these deals. These deals also include blockchain and DLT, a part of our Quartz product line which co-exists with BaNCS.
Blockchain deals
TCS is positioning itself being capable of taking up meaningful blockchain projects globally. In the Indian market itself, the IT major is working on a number of projects that are live with this technology on multiple projects including a large financial institution.
“We are already testing this solution with two market infrastructure institutions and it will go live once it gets cleared from a regulatory standpoint,” Vivekanand added.