Tel Aviv Stock Exchange centralises functions with ERP

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is this year installing its first ever enterprise resource planning system.

Eldad Hershtig, CIO and head of operations at the exchange, says the business was looking for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that was broad in scope and flexible enough to support “various processes in our organisation”. The introduction, from 2010 onwards, of ISOX – the Israeli equivalent of the US Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance legislation – has been a major ERP driver, he says.

Hershtig and his team went with Israel-based ERP supplier Priority Software, and used local reseller FBC Technologies for the implementation.

FBC began the first phase of the project in January 2016. Priority’s ERP suite has applications to serve the exchange’s finance, logistics and procurement needs, and further work is planned to support the exchange’s visitors centre.

Hershtig says he was impressed by FBC’s professional service and support capabilities, and that the reseller delivered the project on time and on budget.

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) has around 260 employees, of whom 160 are in an IT department that is also responsible for the core trading and settlement systems.

Hershtig says: “We didn't have ERP before. We had local tools to monitor our overall budget, which is broken up into separate islands. Each department managed its own budget, and we used different tools to do different things.”

Several companies run under the TASE aegis, including two clearing houses for settlement of derivatives and other assets, such as bonds. The same ERP system manages them all.

The first stage of the project covered the daily operations of TASE. The second has been to generate financial reports for the board and the regulators – a process that was completed in spring 2016.

Hershtig says that though his team did look at ERP products aimed at small and medium-sized businesses such as SAP Business One, Priority is such a “big product in Israel that, in the end, it reflects much better the regulation of the Israeli market.

“Also, the number of reseller companies who know the product and how to integrate with it is very high in Israel. There are enough companies that can support the product, even our specific implementation.”