SEBI Building Tech Tools To Track Pump And Dump, Bulk Deals, Abnormal Trading — Exclusive

The Securities and Exchange Board of India is working on new systems to get alerts on bulk deal, pump and dump situations and their detection, tracking abnormal trading activity and more, people in the know told NDTV Profit.

The work on this has been going on since the past year and there has been some development, they added. Furthermore, a central repository system is being worked upon to help with better organisation and easier inspections, the people said.

Additionally, as reported last year and mentioned by former SEBI Chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch on several counts, the regulator is also working on using AI to go through IPO documents. Currently, work on using large language models to process documents, like draft red herring prospectus, is underway.

The regulator is also increasing its IT workforce. Back in 2021, SEBI's IT team had around 20-25 officers. The number has reached nearly 100 in 2025 and there is an expectation for further increase in the next five years.

The regulator already has alert systems in place for cases of frontrunning and insider trading. In the extended front running case where Ketan Parekh was involved, the regulator got an alert from their own frontrunning detecting systems. In that particular case, SEBI imposed a consolidated penalty of Rs 65.7 crore on him and others engaged in the case.

SEBI is concerned about the volume of pump and dump and price manipulation instances and hence tech driven alert systems are being developed, people in the know added.

In the last few months, the markets regulator has come out with orders against several such entities, including but not limited to Pacheli Industrial Finance Ltd., Bharat Global Developers Ltd., LS Industries and more.

SEBI aims to increase transparency, automation and digitalisation through this initiative, the people mentioned above said.