India Gets First Silverlight Based Trading Portal

At the Microsoft TechEd 2011 event in Bangalore (India), Microsoft and ICICI Securities launched a rich and intuitive version of the online trading portal - ICICI Direct. Apparently, this version of ICICIDirect.com is claimed to be India s first Silverlight 4.0 platform based online trading website. Aimed to offer more engaging experience for online investing and trading, this portal offers movable widgets and is opt-in. The ICICI Direct account holders have to simply log in and then carry on trading with this new RIA experience offering portal.

New ICICI Direct with RIA experience is accessible at https://ria.icicidirect.com and works on modern day web browsers (with Microsoft Silverlight plugin) like IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Do note that this Rich Internet Application based online trading portal requires fairly decent connection.

Rich Internet Applications carry several capabilities of desktop apps and are offered through web browsers. These RIAs give you feel of the desktop applications, consume less memory and the best part is - no installation required.

The RIA version of the new ICICI Direct portal developed on Silverlight 4.0 platform offers a grid interface comprising of nine widgets, once the user logs in. These widgets serve different purpose and each widget has been coded to work as independently. So you can drag and arrange widgets in whichever order you prefer. In a way, it reminds of the AJAX-based start pages like iGoogle and Netvibes that allow adding several AJAX modules to one single page.

Quite intuitive and rich looking RIA version of ICICI Direct has several pre-developed widgets which also includes the one for graphs. The portal uses a HTTPS protocol based connection hence your entire trading activity is secured. ICICI Direct doesn t offer commodities trading in order to abide by the RBI guidelines.

Gone are the days when Online Trading was limited to the Share Broker s office system. Several interested in online trading now wish to trade online and that too with real-time numbers from the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange directly. There s no need of any dedicated Terminal (computer) that needs to be connected directly with the NSE and BSE for getting the latest numbers.

Microsoft Silverlight indeed wins a brownie point especially in India Financial sector with this step. In a way, it does challenge the Adobe Flex and Java. At the end of the day, this competition has now initiated an era of richer and intuitive website experiences for Indian consumers.