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Senior Business Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has shortlisted three out of five vendors that submitted bids for the supply and installation of new price display boards. For the project, the ZSE is seeking a vendor with the ability to meet business, functional and technical requirements, as well as demonstrating the ability of vendor’s system to interface with the Automated Trading System (ATS).

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

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

“Evaluations were done and additional information was sought from the vendors where clarity was required. All of the bids were competitive and the selection process was sufficiently robust to provide the best result.

“Out of the five proposals that we received for evaluation and consideration, we shortlisted the following three companies for further discussions until we’re left with one: Aura Group Zimbabwe, Wavetech Technologies and BMC,” said the ZSE chief executive officer Alban Chirume.

The other two companies that had supplied the bids for price display boards installation at the stock exchange were Scan Natural Hardware and Afriscend.

ATS went live at the ZSE in July.

It is hoped that implementation of the system will go a long way in harnessing Diaspora funds and increase the market share from the retail segment by enabling mobile and Internet-based technologies for transactions.

Before the automation of the local bourse, trading activities were done manually using excel and other basic packages.

Through automation, all the trading requirements have been incorporated in the ATS to eliminate the manual processing and distribution.