NASSCOM has recognised Financial Technologies' DOME solution as a market-facing innovation. DOME (Distributed Order Matching Engine) is an integrated matching engine for commodities as well as equities, providing trading, surveillance, real-time pre-trade risk management, clearing, and settlement. Dewang Neralla, director for Technology at Financial Technologies, speaks on what makes DOME innovative, and a potentially leading product for next-gen financial markets.

How important is innovation in a tech firm like yours, and how do you keep up the vibes of innovation in your organisation?

Our mantra is 'Innovate or Perish' Innovation has to be done not just at a product level, but has to go right to the business model level and beyond. The idea is to eke out productivity from every stretch in the conveyor cycle. In order to innovate, you need to understand the problem really well, which means that your understanding of the domain is paramount. Also, when we look at technology, we need to frame a realistic assumption of the ROI (return on investment) for the customers. This is what we try to instil in all our employees, and every success is celebrated. Therefore, this being contagious, we have been able to create a domino effect for seeding innovation thoughts across our enterprise.

You've won the recognition for a market-facing innovation. How important do you think this is, in comparison to the other two broad types--process and input innovations?

I don't think we would really categorise innovation. As mentioned earlier, you need to innovate at every leg. Having said that, market-facing innovations give you an immediate result and reaction because the effects are felt a lot faster than in other categories.

Can you please tell us more about DOME, and elaborate a bit on the innovation that won you this award?

DOME is our flagship exchange product suite, offering an integrated matching engine, including surveillance, risk management, and clearing and settlement, among other functions, which has made it the 'exchange platform of choice' for all new-generation markets. It is also a highly scalable solution, which can scale up based on increasing load demands. It requires great effort and tremendous experience to develop a product like DOME. Our core DNA for the product was designed in 1995-- since then we have been involved in creating exchange, brokerage, and messaging solutions.