The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has approved the appointment of Ashish Kumar Chauhan as the managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) of the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
Chauhan will replace outgoing Managing Director and CEO Vikram Limaye, whose term ends on July 16. Although Limaye was eligible for a reappointment, he did not seek extension at the NSE.
At present, Chauhan serves as the MD and CEO of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and his term will end in November.
He is expected to be appointed for five years at the rival bourse.
Education
Chauhan did his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay. He then completed his PGDM from IIM Calcutta. He has served as a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.
Founder of NSE
A technocrat from IIT and IIM, Chauhan is considered the father of modern financial derivatives in India. He started his career as a banker with IDBI, getting recruited from the campus in 1991. Chauhan was one of the founders of NSE.
He was part of the five-person startup team at NSE in 1993 that created the NSE under R.H. Patil of IDBI. He was responsible for creating the trading infrastructure at NSE. He was instrumental in setting up the first commercial satellite communications network and India's first fully-automated screen-based trading system. He is the creator of the Nifty index and other path-breaking frameworks such as NSE certifications in financial markets.
After NSE
After Chauhan left the NSE in 2000, he joined a company called exchangenext.com, which was a business-to-business dotcom venture. The Reliance group financed the venture. When the dotcoms crashed, the entire exchangenext.com was shifted to Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Infocomm.
At Reliance Infocomm, Chauhan became the chief information officer (CIO) in 2004. After the split of Reliance Industries, Chauhan stayed with Mukesh Ambani, becoming the group’s CIO in 2005. He was responsible for bringing Reliance’s IT business under one roof.
During his years with the Reliance group, Chauhan was also the CEO of the IPL team Mumbai Indians during its formative years. He also handled additional responsibilities as the head of corporate communications for the group from 2005-06.
In 2009, he left the Reliance group.
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At the BSE
When the BSE bought the IT company called Marketplace Technologies, which provided back-office solutions to brokers, its major stakeholder, Chauhan’s wife, laid the condition that Chauhan would work with the bourse for at least a year. BSE’s then CEO Madhu Kannan was also keen on having him on board. So, Chauhan joined BSE as deputy CEO in September 2009.
After Kannan left the BSE in 2010, Chauhan was left in charge. At the BSE, Chauhan spruced up the management by appointing Nayan Mehta from the NSE as CFO, Kersi Tavadia as CIO, Sounder Rajan as clearing and settlement in-charge, and Shankar Jadhav in charge of strategy.
He is credited with reviving the BSE, making it the fastest exchange in the world with less than six microseconds’ response time. He also introduced mobile trading for the first time in India and online real-time surveillance system. He is credited with introducing several products such as SME, currencies, mutual funds, corporate bonds distribution, offer for sale and offer to buy. Chauhan successfully completed the initial public offering (IPO) of BSE, which got oversubscribed 51 times with close to 12 lakh applications in January 2017.
As the chief of NSE, Chauhan will be likely to launch the bourse’s long-pending IPO, which has been on hold due to regulatory issues.
Till now, there is no clarity on who will succeed Chauhan at BSE. However, the process of shortlisting has already started in Asia’s oldest bourse.
