Egyptian Exchange

Business needs and the process.

To trade on the Egyptian Exchange, EGX member firms are required to use the “FIX protocol,” a standard messaging format developed to facilitate the exchange of information about securities transactions.

Firms using FIX protocol first register with EGX to do testing in a test environment, get approval, and then are registered to operate on a FIX production server.

There were five EGX teams involved in documenting and then automating the process for FIX enrollment: Technical Support, Operations, Networks, Security, and IT. All five teams collaborate to execute a detailed enrollment process:

1. EGX Technical Support receives a written request from a firm wishing to test on the EGX test environment. Technical Support then routes the request to Operations if the firm is not already approved to test on EGX’s environment.
2. Operations receives the request and determines the test server’s IP and port which the firm will use to communicate with EGX.
3. The Network team receives this information and determines the source of the IP form. They then configure a user on the test server and allow the firm to access the test server on the EGX network. The firm’s source IP is then sent to Security.
4. Security determines the firewall IP, and allows the firm access through the EGX firewall.
5. Technical Support sends a confirmation letter to the requesting firm with all connectivity details.

There are also timing issues to take into account in this process. Changes in the FIX gateway configuration have to be completed before the server is started, so the requesting firm's access needs to be activated the day before the test date. And when the test period is over, the test access must be terminated.

There is a separate process to remind team members that a firm has to be activated for testing. This process is automatically started everyday at 8:25 AM. It starts by checking the database (DB) for firms with a status of ‘pending’ and their allocated start date is less than or equal to today’s date. There is also a separate deactivation process that is similarly executed.

Key benefits of the project.

EGX was originally seeking a solution to serve as a repository for documenting their processes. Bonita  has fully met this requirement – and was further implemented to actually automate the entire enrollment procedure.

Before deploying Bonita BPM, EGX’s Quality Assurance team spent time and effort to manually inspect their database to find firms that should be removed after the test period. This inspection and removal process is now done automatically and has saved EGX valuable resources.

After using the automated enrollment process successfully, EGX automated three additional processes: a checklist process, a monitoring process and a stock index update process.