Mobile trading leads to greater inclusion in financial markets: BSE chief

The number of people in financial markets has been growing, especially due to mobile trading, BSE Chairman Ashishkumar Chauhan said on Thursday.

He also said that with the advent of the JanDhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) accounts, about 30 crore accounts were created within a year. This is what brought India into the financial inclusion model.

The BSE chief said that the number of people getting included in financial markets is unbelievably large.

"As on date, we have 7.5 crore investors, and we keep adding 70,000 people daily on an average. From January 1, 2020, till today, the number of investors has grown by 60 per cent," Chauhan, who is the managing director and CEO of BSE, said at FICCI event.

To put this progression into perspective, Chauhan said the BSE had one crore investors in the year 2008. By July 2011, it had two crore investor accounts, which in January 2016 grew to thee crore; by August 2018, the number touched four crore; May 2020 saw five crore; and in January 2021, the BSE had six crore investor accounts.

Further, he credited the rise in the number of people in financial markets to mobile trading, the geographical reach of which is large.

"We have people from the Lakshadweep, and Andaman & Nicobar Islands investing in mutual funds," he added.

Elaborating on the spurt in the number of accounts in the last one and a half year of COVID-19, Chauhan said that while the eastern region boasts of 13 per cent of the accounts, the customer account numbers went up by 68 per cent.

Similarly, the northern region, which accounted for 28 per cent of all accounts, witnessed numbers go up by 67 per cent. Similar trend was seen in the southern region (23 per cent of all accounts) and the western region (34 per cent of all accounts) that saw an increase of 61 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively.

According to him, fintech institutions are coming up in all areas.

"Traditional institutions are under tremendous pressure to maintain their business model, that includes stock exchanges.

"You might see more new exchanges and more depositories coming up. Traditional institutions are also trying to create new regulations to maintain their business models," he added.

Overall, in the past 27 years of automation and digitisation of Indian markets, "we have come a long way, but we still have a longer way to go" , Chauhan said.

He added that India on a regulatory framework basis will have to create more institutions, more competing institutions so that if one closes for a small or a larger period, rest of the ecosystem continues to work.