Bursa CEO willing to take the rap

Bursa CEO: Since I’m head of management, I have to be fully accountable

KUALA LUMPUR: Bursa Malaysia Bhd chief executive officer Datuk Yusli Mohamed Yusoff is willing to bear the responsibility for the technical glitch on Thursday that led to a halt in trading for an entire day.

“Obviously the management would have to bear the responsibility and since I'm head of management, I have to be fully accountable,” he said when asked who would be held responsible for the failure.

The high profile failure of the trading system has brought up talk about Yusli's future in Bursa, a subject that he admitted rested with the board of directors of the exchange.

“I don't decide my contract. All the senior management of Bursa are on contract and it's the board's prerogative if they want to keep us on contract,” he told the media yesterday.

Thursday's trading halt has raised concerns that the system is unreliable, and doubts were compounded by the “bad timing” of the glitch in a period of bad market sentiment that was stirred by the political issues over the past few days.
However, Yusli was quick to reassure that system integrity was the exchange's utmost priority and that the flaw that crashed the exchange's system would “no longer be a problem going forward.”

To ensure this, Bursa is mulling over the idea of an automated start-up of its back-up system in a situation when a partial or single point at the primary site fails.

Chief information officer Yew Kim Keong said trials on its recovery system were previously done for the scenario of a total system breakdown and not when a single point failed.

This happened on Thursday when the derivatives and bond trading were still operating despite the failure in the equities trading system. As such, the exchange decided to only switch on that part to the back-up system.

However, the synchronisation of data between the primary site and back-up system was longer than the anticipated three hours, stopping Bursa from resuming trading in the afternoon, Yew said.

Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn Bhd managing director T.F. Chong said the design of the computer system depended on the business environment and the requirements of the respective stock exchange.

Hewlett-Packard is the vendor of the HP Non-Stop Hardware, which is the existing architecture being used by Bursa.

On whether cost was a constraint for Bursa to have a variety of situational recovery trials, Yusli said the exchange had to be practical.

“We could spend all our time testing on business continuity process (BCP) or draw a line somewhere. Our BCP is in line with international practice,” he said.

Bursa spends the most on technology after manpower, which stood at 30% and 50% respectively of operating cost. Total operating cost amounts to RM200mil.

On the benchmark index's drop of almost 2% yesterday, Yusli said that was in tandem with several markets in the region, which also fell in the last few days.

“Malaysia offers very good values to investors. Even our stock valuations today offer are attractively priced based on fundamentals,” he added.

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