Create value… everything will follow, says NSE chief

Passion and commitment among team members drive an enterprise to greater heights, and that’s what the NSE is all about. Starting with just four volunteers 23 years ago, the exchange is today among the top three globally for stock and index futures and options.

People’s support “We are happy that this country can actually be better than the best and can be counted among the top three markets in the world for products, turnover and retail investor base. All of this happened because there was faith and passion among people,” said the exchange’s Managing Director and CEO, Chitra Ramkrishna.

When the idea to start NSE came about, the government wanted a small team to take up the project. IDBI, with which Ramkrishna was associated, wanted volunteers; from thousands of people, “only four of us were interested and we grabbed the opportunity,” she said at an Extra Mural Lecture on “Risks, Choices and Leadership” at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras. BusinessLine was the media partner for the event.

Today, the NSE network covers 1,500 locations in the country and supports more than 2.3 lakh terminals with 77 lakh trades (in the cash segment) a day. Ramkrishna said the passion was to create a market infrastructure that was globally the best. It was important that irrespective of whether a person lived in a financial capital or a Tier-4 town, he/she had access to the same financial services and market, and bought and sold shares at the same price. This was not the ground rule 25 years ago.

Unless an enterprise had a larger–than-life mission, “one cannot dare to think out of the box. If you create value for stakeholders, everything else follows.” By creating a market infrastructure where people in the North, South, West and East had the same access to market and the same value was created, the market share, leadership and profits will follow.

Satellite technology The exchange could have created four or eight major hubs and tried to find telephone connections in these regions, asked brokers to talk to each other, and have had bulletin boards to display prices. “We could have still called it progress but we re-looked the business model for an efficient market. If information was the heart of an efficient market, then it should be freely, transparently and accurately available. That’s what we provided,” she said.

Today, telecom is fantastic with 10g bandwidth and fibre optic. But in 1992-93, there were modems, and data was transmitted through telephone lines. How to create a national infrastructure?

How to create a market where Guwahati and Madurai traded at the same time? The answer was to use a different technology and that was satellite, she said. “Some of the risks pay off very well, or you have to start it all over again, and prepare for this. We kept our fingers crossed when we took the risk of the satellite, but it worked well,” she said.

Ramkrishna urged students to grab the opportunity that comes to them ‘at the moment’ rather than waiting for it to come. “Opportunities will cross our way everyday and these don’t come with any tag. If we don’t discover opportunities we can’t take them forward at all,” she said.

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