JSE to revamp SENS

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 19 Jul 2007

The JSE Securities Exchange is considering replacing the technology underlying the Stock Exchange News Service (SENS), in order to make it more efficient.

"We are still investigating at this stage; we haven't yet worked out a timeline," says COO Leanne Parsons. "We are still investigating what it is we want to achieve."

Parsons says the technology underlying SENS is about five years old. Although it has been upgraded, "it does have some limitations of what formats you can use... It's not technology constraints, I think it's more about the downstream use of the information that comes out of SENS. Our customers... have made some requests in terms of how they would like to see the solution improved, and we are looking at how we can deliver that."

She adds that the improvements will not cost traders, as SENS is part of the JSE's regulatory obligations. "The way we see it, [we] try get information out to the market as soon as possible. So even the companies that use SENS don't pay for SENS. It is built into our base cost of what you have to do as an exchange."

Checking efficiencies

Parsons says the JSE recently implemented a CRM system and has already found it provides value for money in terms of analytics and generating business intelligence.

"We now have a system where our customer incidents are centrally stored so we can build up a history and go back to it. We used to have a lot of manual processes, so it's made the lives of the guys on the help-desk a lot easier in terms of being able to capture incidents, etc."

The JSE is also looking at improving document flow, Parsons says. "We are looking at the listings information database, which is the current internal system used to manage what comes in from companies from a corporate perspective. It manages the documentation workflow.

"We have service levels that we commit to in terms of which we will review your documentation within 48 hours," she notes. "There's a whole timetable that is attached to the kind of issues the services team do. And we'll be looking at that particular solution and whether that's efficient as it should be.

"We've done a network audit; that was done last year. We've done a network review, there's some end-of-life equipment and we are currently looking at whether we will upgrade our network capacity. But again, you can build 20 failsafes for every component. All 20 could fail and it's not cost-effective to do that. At the end of the day you have got to address all the circumstances you can think of."