E-IPO Integration: from bidding to allotment tracking

#ipo #nse #bse #asba

Originally published at finovo.tech/blog/e-ipo-integration — the canonical version has the latest updates.

Indian retail IPO bidding moved fully digital with the SEBI ASBA mandate. Every broker has to offer customers some way to bid; the spread of quality is huge.

E-IPO Integration is Finovo's bidding + allotment + tracking module that handles both NSE and BSE in one customer-facing flow.

The IPO bidding lifecycle

For each IPO that opens, the broker has to:

Display the IPO to the customer (subscription period, price band, lot size, terms)
Take the customer's bid: shares + price + ASBA bank
Submit the bid to the exchange (NSE or BSE, sometimes both)
Reflect the locked-in funds in the customer's bank
Wait for allotment (usually 5-7 days)
Notify the customer of allotment outcome
Reflect allotted shares in the demat
Refund un-allotted portion to the customer's bank

Each step has its own SEBI / RBI / exchange compliance overlay. Most broker-side bugs we see are at step 5 or 8 — the funds-tracking part — because brokers underestimated how messy ASBA reconciliation gets.

Why NSE + BSE both matter

Some IPOs are listed only on one exchange. Others are dual-listed. The retail customer doesn't care which; they just want to bid. The broker has to abstract the dual-API and present a single bid form to the customer.

NSE's E-IPO API and BSE's E-IPO API have different:

Bid submission payloads
Status polling cadence
Allotment file formats
Refund file formats

Wrapping both into a unified "broker-facing" API is what the integration does.

ASBA mechanics

ASBA (Application Supported by Blocked Amount) is a SEBI mandate that bids must lock the bid funds in the customer's bank account, not transfer them out. The bank releases the locked funds:

For allotted shares: transfers to the IPO issuer's account
For un-allotted shares: releases the lock back to the customer

The broker's role is to construct the right payload to the customer's bank's ASBA system. UPI-based ASBA is the modern default; for customers without a UPI ID, the older bank-portal-based ASBA still works but takes more steps.

Bid validation

Before submitting to the exchange, the bid is validated:

Lot size: bid must be a whole multiple of the IPO's lot size
Price band: bid price must be within the IPO's price band
Customer eligibility: not a related party, not a director of the issuer, etc.
Funds availability: the customer's bank must support the locked amount
Customer category: retail vs HNI — different lots, different rules

Caught early, these prevent exchange-side rejections (which embarrass the broker because the customer thinks they bid successfully).

Allotment tracking

Once the IPO closes, the issuer publishes a basis-of-allotment document. It maps applied lots → allotted lots per category. Brokers receive this from the registrar and must:

Match against the customer's PAN
Notify the customer of allotment / non-allotment / partial
Reflect allotted shares in the customer's demat (DP)
Reflect the refund (release of locked funds) in the customer's bank
Generate the customer-facing allotment letter (PDF, downloadable)

Doing this manually for a popular IPO with 10K+ subscribers is a 2-day exercise per IPO. Automated, it's a 30-minute job.

Customer notifications

The broker should send three notifications per IPO:

Bid confirmation: as soon as the exchange accepts (typically a few seconds)
Allotment update: the day allotment is announced
Refund confirmation: when the un-allotted lock is released (usually the same day, sometimes next day)

We send these via SMS + WhatsApp + push notification. Customers expect WhatsApp; they react when bid status changes via WhatsApp; they ignore email.

Common gotchas

Customers bid at the cut-off price thinking it's the upper-band; it's actually a special "I'll take whatever the final price is" indicator. Frame the UI carefully.
Some HNI customers want to bid via a corporate account (HUF, PVT, etc.) — these have different ASBA paths.
"Anchor allocations" happen 1 day before the public IPO opens; some brokers offer their HNI customers participation. Different flow entirely.
Withdrawn IPOs (rare but happen): the broker has to tell every bidder, refund the lock, and not crash.

Pricing

E-IPO is priced per active IPO, not per bid. Brokers pay a flat per-IPO platform fee + a small per-bid marginal cost. For a typical broker with 50K bids per IPO, this works out to a fraction of the customer-facing brokerage fee on a successful allotment.