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The BSEC has already approved Abdus Salam Sikder as the company’s chairman along with appointing a few directors.

“For revenue, stock brokers mostly depend on brokerage charges. So they were earning almost nothing during the closure,” said Rahmat Pasha, chief executive officer of UCB Capital.

Share trading is a two-pronged system: share transfer and money transfer, he said.

The Central Depository Bangladesh executes share transfers while money transfers are handled by a department of the DSE, he said.

The money transfer process is mostly manual, so brokers fell in hot water when trading stopped, Pasha said. The prolonged closure also had a negative impact on the global image of the domestic stock market, he added.

The DSE already has a platform that facilitates real-time trading of shares from mobile devices or a computer from anywhere in the world.

However, the country’s premier bourse is yet to be integrated into a unified system with the platform, which is why it has to depend on manual labour to complete trade settlements and other similar tasks, he added. “We are working on the issue and the BSEC will appoint a strategic person to complete the entire digitalisation process, said Asif Ibrahim, chairman of Chattogram Stock Exchange.

The digitisation process will become easier as soon as the Central Counterparty Bangladesh starts operations in full swing, he added.