Discount broker FYERS is the latest to suffer a technical glitch. On Thursday, when traders were busy on the monthly expiry day of F&O on the NSE, FYERS witnessed a snag due to intermittent leased line disconnection from the primary Internet Service Provider (ISP) at the NSE’s Mumbai location.

Earlier, another brokerage Shoonya suffered trading disruption on April 13, due to a digitisation process that caused a defect on its front-end for customers.

Tejas Khoday, Co-founder and CEO of FYERS, said, “Unfortunately, some customers faced order transit issues, and others couldn’t place orders in Equity and F&O segments intermittently between 9.20 a.m. and 10 a.m. The issue was resolved within 40 minutes of the occurrence with a successful switchover to a secondary ISP.”

In the case of Shoonya’ the company received about 700 disputes, of which 77.36 per cent were eligible for compensation, as of May 3. The company has covered the losses worth ₹3.5 crore. The broker appointed KPMG as an independent external auditor to review the impact on the trading platform from the technical issue. According to a company release, Shoonya also conducted an internal audit and mock trading sessions to ensure normalcy from the next trading session.

High-traffic systems

However, such incidents impact the strategies that traders have developed over time and dampen confidence in low-cost trading platforms, said an independent trader and a FYERS customer. “Due to the glitch, many traders were unable to exit their positions. After the issue got resolved, many exited with a loss,” he added.

It is to protect traders from such losses that SEBI, in November 2022, put in place a framework.

However stringent the regulatory framework is or robust the technologies are, “these are high-traffic systems where many traders are trying to concurrently execute thousands of orders every second. Every broker is trying to strengthen its infrastructure and tighten its processes to reduce the probability of these glitches. However, reducing these glitches to zero is nearly impossible,” an industry observer told businessline.

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