IT giants keen to upgrade Sebi's fraud detection tools

Technology giants from India and abroad, including Wipro, Tech Mahindra, IBM, HP and HCL, have evinced interest in Sebi's proposal to upgrade business intelligence gathering software which is used for detecting fraudulent activities in capital markets.

Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), which had last month floated a tender to upgrade the software, has also extended the time for submission of bids to January 15, 2015.

Earlier, the bids were to be submitted by December-end. IT firms -- Wipro, Tech Mahindra, IBM, HP, HCL, EMC and SAS -- could be some of the bidders for upgrading Sebi's 'Data Warehouse Capacity and Business Intelligence Report Capacity', going by information available on the regulator's website.

These firms had approached Sebi with some queries related to the proposal, to which the regulator has responded. Data Warehouse Capacity and Business Intelligence Report Capacity -- a software tool used for speedy analysis of data and identification of possible violations like insider trading and money laundering in stock markets -- was set up by Sebi in 2011.

Looking to upgrade this tool at its data centres in Mumbai and Chennai, Sebi has invited bids from agencies to work on the design, supply, installation, configuration and maintenance of the system.

"Submission date of request for proposal for the capacity augmentation/upgrade of its Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence System (DWBIS) on turnkey basis has been extended to January 15, 2015 (3:00 PM)," Sebi said in a notice.

In a tender notice last month, the market regulator had said that it "envisages field upgradeable architecture of the system to handle the future requirements extending to twice the current load with the same level of performance."

While the augmented capacity is proposed to be installed at centres in Mumbai and Chennai, Sebi had also said that the tool may be installed at other data centres, if the existing data centres can't accommodate the new systems.

As per Sebi guidelines, the eligible bidder is required to have "the ability to supply, install, design and implement and maintain the required hardware, operating system, application software (security application, databases) and utilities."

Data Warehouse primarily collects transaction and master data from exchanges (NSE, BSE, MCX-SX, USE) and depositories (NSDL, CDSL) on a daily basis and generates reports for users in a highly time-efficient manner.

Image: Sebi headquarters in Mumbai

Photograph: Courtesy, Wikimedia Commons