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Oliver Kazunga Senior Business Reporter
FIVE vendors have managed to submit bids within the stipulated cut off time for the supply and installation of price display boards at the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE).

The bourse’s chief executive officer Alban Chirume said the tender for the supply and installation of price display boards closed on August 21.

“The ZSE is pleased to announce that bids were received from the following vendors within the cut off time stipulated in the request for proposal document: Afriscend, Aura Group, BMC Markets, Scan-Natural Hardware and Electronics, and Wavetec.

“Update on the initial evaluation and shortlisting of the bids will be sent upon conclusion of this exercise but not later than 30th of September 2015,” he said.

For the project, the ZSE is seeking a vendor with the ability to meet business, functional and technical requirements, as well as demonstrating the capability of vendor’s system to interface with the Automated Trading System (ATS).

Among others, the vendor should have the ability to transfer the knowledge and skills to the ZSE while the system should also be flexible to accommodate functional changes.

Installation of new price display boards at the ZSE was in line with the ATS that went live in July this year.

An ATS is a computer programme that creates orders and automatically submits them to a market centre or exchange.

The system can be designed to trade stocks based on a predefined set of rules which determine when to enter an order, when to exit a position and how much money to invest in each trading product.

Before the implementation of the ATS, trading on the bourse was done manually.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Zimbabwe projects that local brokerage firms could have lost nearly $1 million between 2009 and 2013 due to fraud resulting from weak manual systems and lack of sound internal controls on the local bourse.