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The company's senior officials, while announcing the launch of delivery centre in Chennai, said that while the forward trading channel is currently for bullion traders and customers who buy gold in 1 kg and 100 gram forward contracts at present, the plans are eventually to cater to the retail market.
Suresh Devdani, head - business development, NCDEX, said, "The details for serving the retail is getting designed and we may have to wait for some time to finalise it."
Vivek Jalan, senior vice president, non-agriculture business of the commodity exchange said that the company would be ready to cater to the retail customer in next three to four months.
Devdani also said that the exchange is in the process of setting up delivery centres for Gold Now platform in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Jaipur, which would be completed in three to four weeks.
From the time of launch of the Gold Now platform in the end of May, this year, the exchange has seen trade of around Rs 1 crore worth of the metal through the platform. At present, it has around 800 members in Future trade and 45 members in the Forward Contract platform.
The Gold Now platform will provide an impetus to the domestic recycling industry, which at present consists of 17 refineries, of which it has approved four domestic refineries as Good Delivery on the platform, it said.
NCDEX is in talks with some of the State governments to start model similar to the unified market platform, the Mandi Modernisation Programme (MMP), implemented by the NCDEX and Karnataka government in the State of Karnataka.
He said that the company found banks reluctant to fund the commodities business after the issues with National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL), but banks such as IndusInd, Axis Bank and HDFC Bank has come forward offering funding after seeing NCDEX's electronic website system, Comtrack, which facilitates electronic accounting of commodities deposited in the warehouses approved by the Exchange.
