Chief Executive Officer's Message

The aftermath of the global financial events have underscored the significance of having appropriate levels of market regulation. At Bursa Malaysia, we strive continuously to achieve a good blend of market regulation and market development. Accordingly, a balanced regulatory approach is important to us. Through our robust and effective market regulation framework, we strive to provide a market of integrity.

A more detailed commentary on our regulatory function appears on pages 48 to 51 of this annual report.

TECHNOLOGY & SYSTEMS

On the technology side, a large number of projects were implemented in 2008. As mentioned earlier, there was a significant technology element in most of the initiatives rolled out during the year. The more significant ones include:

1. Bursa Trade Securities
The securities trading system was enhanced from the old System on Computerised Order Routing and Execution (SCORE) into a superior system now called BTS. The new system is scalable, supports a high velocity market, enables open access, reduces latency and is on par with the performance and capabilities of leading exchanges in the developed market.

2. DMA Derivatives
To facilitate advanced trading strategies, the DMA infrastructure reduces latency by routing orders to the trading engine in miliseconds.

3. Other projects include:
a. Refreshing the technology of Bursa LINK to cater to the increasing user needs and demands;
b. Enhancing Sub-Division of Shares, Shares Consolidation and Bonus Issue Exercise in the CDS (SPEEDS) to include more corporate exercises under the programme by early 2009.

Technology development is now an integral part of most initiatives designed to improve our market, our products and our processes, and the coming years promise to be no less exciting than 2008. However, as with all computerised systems, Bursa Malaysia did not escape from the occasional technical problem. We experienced some technical issues in 2008 that affected the securities and the derivatives markets, but we have taken the necessary steps to manage the risk and minimise future disruption by enhancing our business continuity and disaster recovery capability. Improvements include increased availability of systems and faster recovery times in the event of a system failure.