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Around the National Stock Exchange of India, Chitra Ramkrishna was practically her own institution. A founding member of the bourse, she helped shape it into the world’s largest derivatives exchange, opening trading to a growing middle class and serving as its first female chief. In 2016, she stepped down to high praise for her “sterling contribution.”

But the reputation of the woman nicknamed “Queen of the Bourse,” along with the multi-billion dollar exchange, took a shocking tumble last month. Indian authorities accused Ramkrishna of crimes ranging from evading taxes to, more bizarrely, leaking confidential information for years to an unnamed spiritual guru living in the mountains.

The strange tale of mysticism-meets-technology reveals what could be a complete breakdown of security and best practices at the nation’s largest bourse. With the overhang of a messy investigation, bankers in India said the new allegations may not just delay the exchange’s much-awaited initial public offering, but also hurt its growing clout in the global equity market.

ALSO READ: NSE co-location case: CBI court sends Chitra Ramkrishna to jail for 14 days

Over several tumultuous weeks, the authorities arrested Ramkrishna, 59, and Anand Subramanian, her former colleague, who has also been accused of criminal misconduct. Tax authorities searched their homes. This month, Ramkrishna’s successor and the exchange’s current chief executive, Vikram Limaye, said he would step down when his term ends over the summer. The NSE has invited applications through March 25 for a new leader.

“Our credibility is at stake,” Sanjeev Aggarwal, a judge, said this month at a court hearing in New Delhi. “Who will invest in India if scams like this happen?”

The NSE did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, the exchange said it was cooperating with investigators and had made management changes in recent years. Lawyers for Ramkrishna and Subramanian did not return messages and calls seeking comment.

The pair have denied wrongdoing in court. Ramkrishna told regulators that nothing untoward happened with the guru, likening their conversations to “informal counsel from coaches, mentors or other seniors in this industry.”

The drama intensified in February, when the Securities and Exchange Board of India released a 190-page regulatory order disclosing that Ramkrishna had sent sensitive information to an outsider described as a yogi in the Himalayas.

In an interview for that report, Ramkrishna said the figure guided her hand as chief executive, a role she served in from 2013 to 2016. The yogi was non-corporeal, she said, but corresponded using the email address rigyajursama@outlook.com, which combines the names of three religious texts. Ramkrishna referred to the guru as “thee,” “swami ji” and “your lordship.”

SEBI alleged that the yogi had turned Ramkrishna into a “puppet,” remotely controlling finances and steering promotions. In 2013, for instance, she hired Subramanian, though, SEBI said, he had no experience in capital markets. He was later promoted to chief operating officer at the advice of the yogi, according to the report. Employees said Subramanian had enormous influence. One Indian news outlet referred to him as a “modern-day Rasputin-like figure.”

The identity of the yogi has become a key pressure point, dividing the country’s authorities and deepening the mystery of what happened behind closed doors.

Among the most touted theories is that Subramanian was actually the yogi and that he had duped Ramkrishna, a conclusion made by Ernst & Young, which was hired by the exchange to investigate. SEBI contested that claim, writing in the 190-page order that there was still “no conclusive evidence” linking Subramanian to the email address.

ALSO READ: Court refuses VIP treatment to Chitra Ramkrishna, allows prayer books

Using information from that inquiry, Indian officials have also widened another investigation potentially implicating Ramkrishna and Subramanian in facilitating unfair trading access. The incident is known locally as the “co-location scam.”

Many now wonder what regulators, NSE board members and investors did to avert malpractice, and whether issues at the exchange are more systemic than they had previously seemed.

Through a lawyer, Subramanian denied this month that he was the yogi. SEBI did not return requests for comment.

Most Powerful to Most Compromised

The National Stock Exchange was started to root out corruption among Mumbai’s brokers and bankers.

In 1992, Harshad Mehta, a high-profile stockbroker nicknamed “Big Bull,” was charged with funneling $2 billion from banks into equities at the Bombay Stock Exchange, which was founded in 1875 and became India’s premier bourse. When the scandal came to light, India’s markets tanked. Mehta died before the trial finished.

In the early 1990s, Ramkrishna, then a young employee at the Industrial Development Bank of India, was recruited to build a more modern exchange and move trading from an open-outcry ring to an electronic system. With her experience working on a blueprint for India’s capital market regulatory agency, she was selected with four others to create what would become the NSE.

The team worked out of a tiny, leased office in a part of Mumbai known for its defunct textile mills. In 1994, they launched screen-based trading using a satellite, allowing instant access to prices across India.

Ramkrishna’s career soared. In 2013, she took over as chief executive, becoming one of only three women in the world to run a bourse. She cultivated a reputation as a driven, visionary leader. In a 2015 interview with Bloomberg, Ramkrishna cited Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian independence leader, as a role model. One of her goals, she said, was to make stocks accessible to the middle class using an exchange-traded basket of securities known as ETFs.

“I’m sure even he would have bought my ETFs!” she said in the Bloomberg interview, referring to Gandhi.

On her first day as chief executive, she appointed Subramanian, an outsider who had previously worked in middle management at a leasing and repair service company. After just three years, Ramkrishna nearly tripled his salary to more than half a million dollars, according to the SEBI order. The pair used their own elevator. When Subramanian visited the trading floor, an entourage installed separate soap dispensers and hand towels for him in the restroom, the local news outlet Mint reported.

ALSO READ: I-T department raids premises of ex-NSE chief Chitra Ramkrishna

She was also deeply interested in spirituality, making many decisions after consulting astrological charts, according to the book “Absolute Power,” a chronicle of the NSE’s highs and lows written by two investigative journalists.

While in office, regulators suspected that the pair had allowed some brokers to host their servers in the same building as the NSE, providing them with faster access to the trading system. However, Ramkrishna blamed irregularities on “technical glitches,” according to the Economic Times, and has successfully appealed against penalties. Some bankers accused by regulators of helping them continue to work at the bourse, Mint reported.

After Ramkrishna stepped down in 2016, Limaye, a Wall Street veteran and graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the world’s most prestigious business schools, took over as chief executive. The exchange tried to improve stakeholder relationships and put in place new policies to reduce broker defaults.

The NSE continues to report strong results as the number of investors in Indian markets surges. For January, retail investment reached 287 billion rupees, far exceeding figures from December (112 billion rupees) and November (136 billion rupees), according to the latest available data.

Even so, the new involvement of the tax office and federal police in the investigations could derail progress, bankers in India said. Several foreign investors have pulled out. Exchange data show Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Norwest Venture Partners sold their entire stakes in the NSE in the year that ends March 31.

Shriram Subramanian, the founder and managing director of InGovern, a firm that advises investors, said it was unclear whether “this was a misdoing of the past and NSE has learned its lessons.”

The bourse needs to be aware, he said, “that all stakeholders and prospective investors will be scrutinizing the company closely.”

--With assistance from Upmanyu Trivedi, Shruti Srivastava, Vrishti Beniwal, Kai Schultz and Jeanette Rodrigues.

U.S. officials have observed an uptick in the use of digital assets to facilitate illicit finance since Russia invaded Ukraine, but the transaction volume is too small to play a big role in helping Moscow evade sweeping sanctions, a senior Treasury official said on Friday.

Nellie Liang, Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, said the current state of digital assets would not be large enough to run an economy on, and that the ecosystem is too underdeveloped for individuals to effectively evade sanctions using such assets.

"The transaction size we've seen is fairly small," Liang told Reuters in an interview. "Of course, we recognize we may not see everything, but there is a fair amount of oversight. At this point, we just don't see that it could be used in a large-scale way to evade sanctions."

Liang said the Treasury has been studying the issue for years, and that Group of Seven advanced economies and other countries have also raised concerns about use of digital assets for illicit finance, making effective enforcement imperative.

"People are very aware of it, and paying attention to it," she said. "While it's growing because the use of crypto is growing, its share as a medium for illicit finance is not anywhere as large as just using cash."

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen earlier this month vowed to address potential gaps in tough sanctions slapped on Russia following its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and said there were anti-money laundering laws in place to prevent members of Russia's elite from using cryptocurrencies to evade those measures.

Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special military operation" that is not designed to occupy territory but to destroy its neighbor's military capabilities.

Despite repeated assurances from Biden administration officials that crypto could not be used at a large scale to help Russia circumvent sanctions, several Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have expressed concern that Russian oligarchs could turn to digital asset platforms, having been shut out of the traditional financial system.

Warren, along with 10 other Democratic senators, introduced a bill Thursday that would enable the president to sanction foreign cryptocurrency firms doing business with sanctioned Russian entities and prevent them from transacting with U.S. customers.

Liang, who will lead Treasury's effort to implement President Joe Biden's recent executive order on cryptocurrencies, said she had not yet seen the legislation.

That executive order directed the Treasury along with the Justice Department and other agencies to study the legal and economic ramifications of creating a U.S. central bank digital currency and author reports on the role that cryptocurrencies will play in the evolving payments landscape.

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As the world economy was recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war has once jolted the entire system. The Western countries have imposed heavy economic sanctions against Russia. One of the major sanctions which attracted attention was the Western central banks asking the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system to block some Russian banks from international payments.

Finance relies immensely on flow of information, and hence the history of finance and communications go hand-in-hand. The financial sector is usually an early adopter of whichever new communication technology that promises to deliver information faster. So from pigeons or telegraph or web technology, finance is pretty much at the centre of using it. SWIFT is a similar communication technology.

In 1973, SWIFT was established in Belgium when 239 banks from 15 countries joined hands to solve a major problem of communicating about cross-border payments. SWIFT started functioning in 1977 by replacing telex with a computer-based system to transmit messages. Since then communication technology has transformed, and so has SWIFT. SWIFT is a financial co-operative used by more than 11,000 institutions across 200-plus countries and territories, and services. SWIFT transmitted 10 million messages in 1979, and crossed nearly 10 billion messages by 2020.

SWIFT is owned and controlled by 3,500 shareholders, which are mainly financial institutions. The shareholders elect a 25-member board representing banks across the world.

In 1983, the central banks became members of this network. Overtime, the central banks were not just its members but ‘overseers’ too. The G10 central banks, which governed the system, were led by the Central Bank of Belgium, and included Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, and Sweden.

In 1999, the European Central Bank was established, and was made an overseer of SWIFT. In 2012, the SWIFT Oversight Forum was established to share SWIFT-related information with other central banks. The forum included the central banks of 10 countries: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, and Turkey.

It is these G10 central banks which have asked the SWIFT to bar some Russian banks. These sanctions raise three major issues facing the world economy.

First, it is not surprising to see that the majority of the central banks which oversee the SWIFT system are from developed economies. In several ways SWIFT governance resembles the governance of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, etc. These institutions are meant to serve the global community, but are primarily run by and for developed countries. These institutions are ‘global’ for namesake as developed countries use these to serve their goals. This is evident in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis as well.

Second, while Russian attacks on Ukraine are deplorable, the West is equally responsible for the ongoing war. The US and Western Europe have been pushing Ukraine to join NATO, which is a major reason for the current crisis. So should there have been sanctions on the G10 banks for their part in the conflict? If invading a country was the grounds to impose these sanctions, why haven’t such sanctions been taken against the US for its highhandedness over the past few decades?

Third, we need to think of alternatives to the SWIFT system. The sanctions are affecting every country that has trading ties with Russia, including India. In the wake of these sanctions, authorities are trying to revive a Rupee-Ruble payment line. Some countries have been experimenting with Central Bank Digital Currencies for cross-border payments. Going forward, these experiments will likely become more mainstream.

Centralisation is not limited to SWIFT payments alone. In the last 15 years, the world economy has faced three major crises: the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and now the Russia-Ukraine war. The three have pointed to a paradoxical aspect facing the world economy. While the technological forces should have decentralised and created more choices, we actually see more centralisation and less choices. The 2008 crisis showed the centrality of US financial system, the pandemic showed the centrality of the Chinese trading system, and the Ukraine crisis shows the centrality of SWIFT and the US Dollar in the payment systems. The centralisation of these systems has meant that when there is a crisis, it spreads like wildfire across the world economy.

At the turn of the century it was thought that humans had overcome most of the problems it faced in the 20th century. Two decades into the 21st, and it seems like a re-run of the previous century with a financial crisis, pandemic and now war. In addition to these, there is a climate crisis, which could be the mother of all crises. So much for the human hubris, but will we ever learn?

Click Here:- Reliance, Ola Electric, others to get incentives in battery scheme: Report

Reliance Industries and Softbank Group-backed Ola Electric have won bids to receive incentives under India's $2.4 billion battery programme, four sources told Reuters.

The Indian government last year finalised a programme to incentivise companies to make battery cells locally as it looks to establish a domestic supply chain for clean transport and renewable energy storage to meet its decarbonisation goals.

Ten companies submitted bids totalling about 130 gigawatt hours (Gwh), of which four have won, the sources said.

Reliance and Ola did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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The rupee advanced 32 paise to 75.89 against the US dollar in the opening trade on Thursday, supported by positive domestic equities, broad dollar weakness and softening crude oil prices.

At the interbank foreign exchange, the rupee opened at 75.96 against the US dollar and gained momentum to quote 75.89, a gain of 32 paise from the previous close.

On Wednesday, the rupee spurted by 41 paise to close at a nearly two-week high of 76.21 against the American currency.

The Indian rupee opened higher tracking overnight weakness in the greenback and crude oil, Reliance Securities said in a research note.

"Risk assets rose, and the dollar declined despite the Federal Reserve signalling an aggressive monetary tightening cycle and could also lend support to the rupee,” it added.

The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 bps and signalled six more rate hikes this year.

Meanwhile, the dollar index, which gauges the greenback’s strength against a basket of six currencies, declined 0.24 per cent to 98.38.

Global oil benchmark Brent crude futures rose 1.75 per cent to USD 99.74 per barrel.

On the domestic equity market front, the Sensex was trading 999.94 points or 1.76 per cent higher at 57,816.59, while the broader NSE Nifty rose 277.75 points, or 1.64 per cent, to 17,253.10.

Foreign institutional investors emerged as net buyers in the capital market on Wednesday as they purchased shares worth Rs 311.99 crore, as per stock exchange data.

Click Here :- Macquarie Cap analyst further cuts Paytm target price, estimate at Rs 400

Paytm, the Indian digital payments startup whose stock has slumped 71% since its November market debut, had its price target reduced further by an Macquarie Capital Securities (India) Pvt. analyst who was early to predict the company’s market troubles.

Macquarie’s Suresh Ganapathy cut his price estimate to 450 rupees ($5.90) from 700 rupees, citing lower valuations for fintech companies globally. He didn’t change his earnings or revenue estimates for Paytm, which he rates underperform. The stock rose to 634.05 rupees on Wednesday.

Paytm pulled off the largest-ever initial public offering in India, but has since faced a number of challenges. Ganapathy cited fintech regulations and stricter compliance norms as potential headwinds -- on Friday, the Reserve Bank of India barred the company’s Paytm Payments Bank venture from accepting new customers, adding pressure on the stock.

The average 12-month price target among nine analysts covering Paytm is 1,203 rupees, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The initial public offering by One 97 Communications Ltd., the parent company for Paytm, had been touted by some as a symbol of India’s growing appeal as a destination for global capital, particularly for investors looking for alternatives to China.

Ahead of the listing, Macquarie analysts including Ganapathy initiated coverage with an underperform rating and a price target of 1,200 rupees. The IPO was priced at 2,150 rupees.

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ndia is boosting fertiliser imports from nations including Canada and Israel to ensure sufficient supplies for the coming summer sowing season after the disruption of shipments caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

India is a leading importer of fertilisers for its huge agriculture sector, which employs about 60% of the country's workforce and accounts for 15% of the $2.7 trillion economy.

"This time we have made advance preparations for kharif (summer sown crop) season. We need about 30 million tonnes of fertilisers and arrangements are in place," fertiliser minister Mansukh Mandaviya told Reuters, without elaborating.

He said India will have a comfortable opening stock, about a quarter of the overall amount of fertilisers needed for the summer season.

Indian farmers usually start planting crops including rice, cotton and soybean with the arrival of monsoon rains in June.

To fertilise the crops, India depends on imports for its entire annual consumption of 4 million to 5 million tonnes of potash and ships in a third of this from Belarus and Russia.

Landlocked Belarus uses ports in Russia and Lithuania for its exports.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, shipping routes have been closed off and western sanctions on Moscow, which has described its actions in Ukraine as a "special military operation", have made it difficult to trade with Russian and Belarusian companies.

Indian Potash Ltd (IPL) has increased imports from Canada, Israel and Jordan.

It will buy 1.2 million tonnes of Potash from Canada, 600,000 tonnes from Israel and 300,000 from Jordan in 2022 to partly replace supply from Russia and Belarus, numerous sources said.

A senior industry official who declined to be named said IPL was trying to ensure that "a substantial amount of shipments" arrive before June to prevent any shortage during the sowing season.

India was close to signing a three-year fertiliser import deal with Russia during Mandaviya's visit to Moscow planned for this month. The visit was postponed following the Ukraine invasion, which began on Feb. 24.

One of the sources said India may try again to sign the deal "when the situation improves".

Traditionally India has used prices struck in deals with Belarus and Russia as the benchmark for supplies from other countries. For 2022, Canada has emerged as a price setter, the sources said.

IPL is buying potash from companies in Canada and Israel at $590 per tonne on a delivered basis with six months credit in 2022. IPL declined to comment.

India also relies on Russia and Belarus for complex fertilisers that provide more than one crop nutrient.

To help make up for any lost supplies of nitrogen, phosphate and potash, Indian companies are also increasing supplies from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the sources said.

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In the end, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani settled the dispute over who gets to own the assets of beleaguered Future Retail Ltd. not in an arbitration tribunal in Singapore, or in a courtroom in New Delhi, but in a shopping aisle.

Future Retail had been subleasing store space from the tycoon’s Reliance Industries Ltd. Indeed, it was kept operating only on Ambani’s forbearance because Future couldn’t come up with the rent. But with Amazon.com continuing to block Reliance’s $3.4 billion purchase of Future’s assets, Ambani decided to make the acquisition a fait accompli: He terminated the leases and is taking control of the properties.

It was a dramatic denouement to a three-year-old saga. Amazon was Future’s original rescuer, investing $192 million into a gift voucher unit controlled by its founder Kishore Biyani so he could use the money to steady the debt-laden Indian retailer.

The condition of that 2019 deal was that assets — about 1,500 stores nationwide — wouldn’t be sold to Ambani, who owns India’s largest retail empire. When Biyani did exactly that after Covid-19 decimated operations, Amazon began proceedings against Future for breach of contract. The Reliance deal was in limbo — until Ambani decided he’d had enough.

The desperation was palpable in the messages Future sent Reliance. “Please confirm that there will not be any reduction in consideration payable,” said a March 2 missive from Future, as reported by Saritha Rai and P R Sanjai of Bloomberg News. Then, one paragraph later, “It is important for our stakeholders to have visibility on the final consideration.” Was Future Retail living under a rock? Its bailout by Ambani was always clearly a commercial deal, not a humanitarian mission. It was Future’s job to take care of its stakeholders, including creditors.

And where’s Amazon in all this? By now, it must have learned that taking on Ambani on his home turf was futile. Once the ground had shifted from under its feet, Amazon offered an out-of-court settlement over its funds infusion in Future Coupons Pvt. — which had been its first move in the drama. Amazon couldn’t have rescued Future Retail directly because India’s draconian foreign direct investment rules were in the way. So it did the next best thing: funding privately held Coupons and, thus, indirectly exercising some control over Retail.

That control proved to be tenuous. After it agreed to Reliance’s deal, Future wanted to wriggle out of the contract with Amazon. Its independent directors complained to India’s trustbuster that the multinational firm had deliberately misled the authority about the true nature of the Coupons deal, which effectively put Amazon in the driver’s seat at Retail, violating India’s 2018 foreign direct investment law. The regulator promptly suspended its earlier approval of Amazon’s investment, and the Delhi High Court halted the Singapore arbitration panel’s work. (Singapore’s reputation as an Asian arbitration hub draws many cross-border deals to the city-state.)

But if the near-bankrupt firm with a net worth of negative $280 million was betting that Rescuer No. 2 would wait patiently as it sorted out its legal troubles with Benefactor No. 1, it misjudged the situation. According to a March 9 disclosure by Future Retail, 342 of its large stores and 493 of smaller outlets — constituting 55% to 65% of retail revenue — have so far received termination notices of sub-leases from Reliance entities.

It’s disingenuous for Future to now appear shocked, shocked, that its preferred savior is moving in before consummating the formal purchase, doing everything to make an omelet that can’t be unscrambled by any authority: Possession, after all, is nine-tenths of the law. Amazon had given the loss-making firm an option as late as January for a further $914 million bailout, but Future's independent directors judged the offer to be inadequate, given the ballooning debt. As things stand, it’s for Future’s 2025 dollar bondholders to figure out if they’ll be made whole. Trading around 60 cents to the dollar through the stealth acquisition, the notes don’t seem to be indicate a surfeit of creditor confidence.

How does a physical takeover work? There’s inventory, furniture, lighting and point-of-sale equipment, all pledged to creditors. “Your insistence of removing all such assets from the stores may not be practically possible and such removal may result in irreversible losses in terms of value,” says a March 5 letter to Reliance, this time by Future Lifestyle Fashions Ltd. “We would request your goodselves not to take any actions with respect to the assets as well as premises till we can discuss ….”

There’s nothing left for the “goodselves” at Reliance to discuss. The upshot is this: On the prodding of Future Retail, the Indian justice system put a bullet through the country’s arbitration law, never giving it a chance to settle a simple commercial dispute. The consequences are for Future — and India — to bear.

It’s now clear that, when faced with muscular opponents, the odds of enforcing a contract in the country are slim. Nobody ought to complain if foreigners are skeptical of India’s reported strides in “ease of doing business.” But then, it’s a fast-modernizing market of 1.4 billion consumers. Amazon can’t give up on it. The Seattle-based firm alleged in a March 15 newspaper ad that Future was trying to remove the “substratum of the dispute” by transferring its stores to Ambani in a “clandestine manner.” The e-commerce giant also informed India’s top court that truce talks had failed. It’s hard to say if Amazon’s continued protests will dissuade Future's lenders from blessing the de facto change of control — or if it’s already too late for that.

As for Future, it doesn’t have much of one. Going extinct is a feature of capitalism. But the ignominious manner in which an Indian pioneer of modern retail got taken apart store by store because of the wrong choices it made should be a case study. However, before academics get busy, creditors need to find out where the shopping racks and the cash machines are kept. It’s their collateral, after all, and the overarching lesson of this contest has been that everyone should grab what they can. While stocks last.

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Around 66 per cent of the BSE 500 universe is in the red since October, with 71 stocks losing more than 25 per cent of their value.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the subsequent market correction may appear to be a good opportunity for investors to nibble into these stocks. But market watchers are of the opinion that valuations are still expensive and there is no clear answer to whether the markets have turned attractive.

“Given India’s already stretched equity valuations and global headwinds, we believe the market may remain choppy and advise investors to wait for better entry opportunities and invest only upon large corrections,” said a recent note by Credit Suisse Wealth Management India.

Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) remain uncomfortable with India’s valuation premium and have sold about $20 billion since October. Nevertheless, domestic institutional investors (DIIs) and retail investors have absorbed a significant portion of selling pressure, so far. The mammoth LIC initial public offering, expected over a few weeks, may also impact liquidity, leading to a further correction.

The benchmark indices have recouped losses over the last few sessions after a steep correction the week before and are down 3 per cent in the year to date.

The market may not be fully factoring in the longer-term impact of the rising interest rates and inflation. “The impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on global inflation, commodity prices, and supply chain can only be known over the next two quarters. And we are yet to figure out the impact of the rising interest rates and inflation in India,” said Deepak Jasani, head-retail, HDFC Securities.

FMCG companies in India, for instance, have already effected price hikes of 10-25 per cent across categories, such as soaps, shampoos, paints, biscuits and edible oil in FY22.

The ongoing crude and commodities shock in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is likely to have negative implications for India’s macro situation in terms of higher inflation and bond yields, higher current account deficit, weaker INR, and potentially weaker consumer demand, and thus a lower GDP growth rate.

Some market watchers believe that the recent correction in the market has made valuations more palatable. At 18.1x currently, the Nifty index valuation appears to be expensive relative to the 20-year average of 16.1x and reasonable versus the 10-year average of 18.5x, according to Emkay’s India strategy report. The Nifty composition has changed towards higher P/E (growth) stocks, which makes recent averages more relevant, it said.

“Several stocks have corrected 25-50 per cent from their peak over the past 4-5 months. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine poses a near-term headwind but there is scope for bottom-up investing in the mid- and small-cap segments,” said Sachin Shah, Fund Manager, Emkay Investment Managers.

Kotak Institutional Equities says it finds reasonable reward/risk balance in sectors, such as banks and diversified financials, capital goods, real estate and specialty chemicals, while valuations of most ‘growth’ stocks remain rich.

Also Read |  World Consumer Rights Day │ Fintech firms must examine robustness of their tech platforms

The advent of numerous fintech companies on the horizon is a great advertisement of the enormous business opportunities that India provides, and can, also significantly advance the cause of financial inclusion in the country.

As we observe World Consumer Rights Day 2022 on March 15, for which  ‘Fair Digital Finance’ has been chosen as the theme, it would thus be fitting if the occasion could lead to a relook by fintech companies at their technology platforms and algorithmic models to find out how these may be improved to better serve customer interests.

At a time when a large quantum of transactions is being done digitally, technology vulnerability of fintech companies, especially their inability to adequately safeguard customer data, could have adverse connotations not just for the specific entities and their clients, but the entire financial sector. The cumulative value of digital transactions in India surged from Rs 15,887.88 crore in April 2021 to Rs 23,099.34 crore in February.

In April, a World Bank Group Policy Research Paper titled ‘Consumer Risks in Fintech – New Manifestations of Consumer Risks and Emerging Regulatory Approaches’ had also emphasised this fact by stating: “Platform or other technology malfunctions can have adverse impacts on consumers ranging from inconvenience and poor service to monetary loss and loss of data integrity, the risk of which may be increased due to heavier reliance on automated processing of transactions”.

Making the algorithmic process fairer could ensure that it is not being discriminatory towards any demography, socio-economic category, and place of stay of likely customers. More importantly, a periodic review of the algorithms used could prove handy in determining whether these are in line with international best practices, and appropriately factors in the India context.

The 2,000-plus fintech companies operating in India — the overwhelming majority of which have come up in the last five years — could also examine whether their governance models and existing systems and processes are robust enough to handle rapid growth, while not compromising with the quality of service they provide to customers.

Embarking on such an exercise could benefit the fintech segment overall in terms of being able to identify and address the likely pain points that may emerge in future through an unbridled rise in transaction numbers. An initiative of this kind could also make the sector more resilient through the introduction of upgraded systems and processes, including the way it meets its manpower requirements and trains employees for their assigned jobs.

From an individual fintech company’s perspective, the gains from such efforts could be in the form of becoming more sustainable, an increase in its customer-centricity, and a rise in its attractiveness among potential investors. All these combined could help a company stand out from its peers in a market that is increasingly getting commoditised.

Given the importance of the financial sector in the economy, authorities, too, may consider stepping up their vigil to ensure that fintech startups are not overreaching themselves to achieve ‘unicorn’ status at the earliest and, also, not luring customers with lofty promises that they may find difficult to meet later. Authorities taking a closer look at how the fintech companies are going about their jobs could lead to the long-term sustainability of the sector by ensuring that its operations remain within a defined rule-bound framework. Moreover, it would reduce the likelihood of some fintech firms trying to play fast and lose to earn more money in the quickest possible time.

Significantly, it would further increase the faith of ordinary people in fintech companies as authorities could nudge fintech companies to provide more information on customer grievance handling processes, including likely turnaround times to settle complaints.

There is little chance of some level of pro-activism shown by authorities to protect customer interests coming in the way of the growth of the Indian fintech sector, including overseas investment flows into this arena. No progressive fintech company or likely investor would mind that as they too realise that for authorities anywhere citizen interests would always come ahead of everything else.

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