IT enables Sharekhan roar

The name Share Khan invokes some bygone memories and picturesque images of a forgotten forest somewhere in central India, a tiger on the prowl, and on the hunt of the ‘man-cub’ Mowgli. Rudyard Kipling immortalized the character of Share Khan in The Jungle Book.

Of late, there has been another Sharekhan on the prowl, specifically on the Indian bourses. This benign tiger still deals with the bulls and the bears and enables thousands of customers to trade online.

Sharekhan.com, the online trading portal in India, promoted by SSKI ventures, has been in existence for quite a few years. And as the Indian economy has grown, so has the company.

Today Sharekhan has close to some 300,000 registered users online trading everyday. It has also gone in for a brick and mortar presence, setting up offices across the country. All these efforts have been enabled by technology and the person in charge of technology is Ketan Parekh, the CTO.

In an interaction with Shashwat Chaturvedi from CyberMedia News, Parekh speaks about the evolution of IT processes at Sharekhan and how the market is evolving, at large. Excerpts:

How has the IT infrastructure evolved at Sharekhan?

The change started sometime in 1999. Around the same time, we had made substantial investment in the systems at Sharekhan. There was a realization of sorts that it was not only systems that were important and critical. But so were the processes and people. Pouring money is not necessarily the best approach. Thus we started to rework on the infrastructure, the design, the products and the solutions. Today, we have a centralized data center that takes care of all our transactions. The systems at Sharekhan are driven by the philosophy to make superior products and superlative services available to customers in a simple and speedy fashion.

How is technology enabling online trading in India?

The very name, online trading is a dead giveaway. It is all about technology period. Even, then, there are three components to it, namely people, processes and systems. In online trading there is a distinct focuses towards providing more value added services to customers like content and mobile updates, all these are enabled by using technology.

How do you integrate the offline and online trading mechanisms at Sharekhan?

There is a distinct segregation in terms of services that we provide. One thing is for sure, we are focused at pushing all our clients on the online platform, as it is convenient and customized to the customer. The offline model is more geared towards serving the needs of HNI clients, who require relationship managers, etc.

What is the IT roadmap for the future?

For us IT is an enabler. Till now, we were more or less concerned and geared towards stabilizing the systems and preparing for the big leap. We have more or less achieved that goal. Now, we are testing technologies from a more business perspective, like using BI, etc.

As a CTO, what are the biggest concerns/challenges that you have faced at Sharekhan?

Challenges keep changing with time, so when I had joined the organization, the challenge was more about scale and security. Now I am looking at how to shorten the project lifecycle, bringing in more people oriented processes in place.

© CyberMedia News