Weeks after being pronounced guilty of abusing its dominant market position by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), leading bourse the National Stock Exchange (NSE) has settled a trading software dispute with its fierce rival Financial Technologies (FTIL).
"National Stock Exchange and Financial Technologies settled all their disputes in relation to a suit in the Bombay High Court in this matter," FTIL said today in a regulatory filing.
The two filed "Consent Terms" for the settlement yesterday, the filing further said.
NSE and FTIL have had significant business relationship, till the time the latter was only in trading software and commodity exchange business with MCX.
However, they came into direct rivalry after FTIL group decided to enter stock exchange business with MCX-SX and their dispute is said to have come into light over the ODIN matter.
The dispute dates back to 2008, when NSE had put FTIL's trading and risk management system software ODIN on 'watch list' after alleging it to have bugs and various other issues.
At that time, ODIN used to command about 80% market share in Indian market as a vast majority of brokerage houses were using this trading platform.
However, ending their long-running dispute in this matter, NSE and FTIL have now reached a settlement.
As part of the consent terms, NSE has agreed to remove 'FTIL-ODIN' from its Watch-List with immediate effect and has also agreed to FTIL the Application Protocol Interface (API) for the currency market segment.
Also, the NSE has agreed "to grant approvals in respect of new services/products of FTIL, subject to completion of pre-described requirements as agreed and FTIL shall co-operate with NSE for the same".
Earlier in June this year, the CCI ruled that NSE was guilty of abusing its dominant market position. The CCI order followed a probe by it pursuant to a complaint filed by MCX-SX, where NSE was accused of killing competition in the currency derivatives business.
MCX-SX is currently allowed to trade in currency market only and its application for equity and other segments has been rejected by Sebi. MCX-SX has challenged the Sebi decision and the matter is currency sub-judice.
In its order, CCI had also directed NSE to put in place a system that would allow brokers a choice to select any software for trading, including ODIN, on the NSE platform.
According to the CCI, NSE's conduct in refusing to share Application Programme Interface Code (APIC) with ODIN and putting FTIL on watch list was an "exclusionary conduct".
The APIC would allow the ODIN users to connect to the NSE trading platform through their preferred mode.
