India’s capital markets have never seen volumes like this. Retail participation is deepening. Algorithmic trading is moving from niche to mainstream. Order-to-trade ratios are climbing sharply. Yet, as 2025 unfolds, the country’s market infrastructure institutions are showing visible signs of technological strain.
The most telling development has come from BSE. In a circular issued on December 18, the exchange announced that trading members would be charged for order messages beyond 10 crore messages per day at the trading member level.
While framed as a system-load management measure, the practical impact will be felt most by retail algorithmic traders who are only now scaling up, followed by domestic and foreign high-frequency trading firms. Instead of expanding system throughput to accommodate rising participation, the exchange appears to be rationing access by pricing it. That is a significant shift in philosophy for a market competing aggressively for liquidity.
What makes the move more puzzling is the contradiction it reveals. On the one hand, BSE has been expanding its co-location infrastructure by adding rack space, signalling an intent to attract latency-sensitive players. On the other, it is discouraging higher order flow by imposing message charges. Capacity is being increased at the physical layer, while constrained at the software layer. The result is a strange dichotomy that raises questions about end-to-end system scalability.
The issue is not isolated. BSE’s trading platform is maintained by Tata Consultancy Services, and persistent message throttling suggests unresolved architectural limits rather than temporary congestion. This challenge is exacerbated by the lack of continuity in technology leadership.
A similar stress pattern is visible at MCX. The Exchange faced technical glitch on 28 October 2025, leading to a delay of more than four hours in the commencement of trading. MCX said that all trading systems were now functioning normally. Due to a technical issue at the exchange, the commencement of trading was delayed, it said, adding that the operations were shifted to the Disaster Recovery (DR) site, and trading started at 1.25 pm.
Both BSE and MCX use trading technology originally developed by Deutsche Börse, implemented locally by TCS. These systems were designed for wholesale-heavy European markets. India, by contrast, is a retail-dominated market generating several multiples of order traffic. There is no public data quantifying this multiple, but the symptoms are increasingly hard to ignore.
Against this backdrop, NCDEX appears to be taking a more cautious route. As reported in media, the exchange is evaluating technical proposals from reputed global vendors—including its existing vendor LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), US-based Nasdaq, London-headquartered Aquis and India’s largest software exporter Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)—for its equity and equity derivatives platform slated for launch in the next fiscal year
