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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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.
