From 'Game Of Rich' To Powering 8.5 Crore Households: NSE CEO On Exchange's Impact
The National Stock Exchange has brought transparency in terms of pricing and corporate governance, says Ashish Kumar Chauhan.
Ashish Kumar Chauhan, chief executive officer of National Stock Exchange of India Ltd, has highlighted NSE's role in popularising stock trading and making it more accessible to the average Indian.
Talking to NDTV Profit on Friday as part of the Disruptors show, the managing director discussed NSE's role in having stock trading go from a "game of the rich" ' with 10 lakh investors in the nineties to 11.8 crore investors in present day.
"Only in retrospect, you think it was a disruption, sometimes you do it out of necessity, or out of whims. Largely, it is hard work, trying to use as much new tech as possible and magic happens," Chauhan said.
An Indian Institute of Technology graduate, he joined IDBI Bank after passing out of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta at 23 in 1993. The bank was a development financial institution and the largest in India.
"We (Chauhan and his peers) had a lot of pride to work for these institutions. Called ourselves the generation of liberalisation," he said.
In the nineties. the Bombay Stock Exchange only allowed two hours of trading. Not because 24-hour trading was looked down upon but because it was not feasible at the time.
"The number of trades would take 13-16 days to get posted. People used to trade on the footpaths," Chauhan said.
He recounted how the lack of technological transparency led to scams like the one in 1992 pulled off by fraudster Harshad Mehta. Chauhan had also lost up to Rs 50,000 to the scam and its after-effects.
Chauhan was one of the five people IDBI selected to design and build NSE from the ground up. Chauhan was the youngest person in the NSE team and knew his way around spreadsheet software in computers, which his peers were not as experienced with.
"Many of NSE's ideas had not worked before in the world. Nobody knew how it was going to work; nobody had given it a chance. We used satellites for connectivity, NSE was the seed that changed India not only in finance but also technology," Chauhan said.
NSE started spreading terminals across India. Chauhan said that this move changed India "transformationally".
"India did not have more than 10 lakh people investing, it was a game for the rich. Had a very bad name. Dalal is still a four-letter word in Hindi," Chauhan said.
He said that stock exchanges were considered a very small avoidable place, and that people had tremendous faith in banks. With stock exchanges being less than 10% of India's banking system size.
"Today after 30 years. NSE's market cap hit Rs 450 lakh crore, almost 125 times larger. We now have 11.8 crore unique PAN members having investors with NSE," the NSE CEO said.
He also stated that NSE's scale and size was 170% of India's banking system. And further said that 25% of traders using NSE are women.
According to Chauhan, the NSE brought transparency in terms of pricing and corporate governance.
"The exchange's power is to ask companies to give information, if it doesn't comply, we suspend them in accordance with Securities and Exchange Board of India regulations. If brokers do anything wrong, we stop them from trading. The power of transparency has got 8.5 core households to invest in entrepreneurs," he said.
