By Faith Anisiobi, The Sight News
The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Asia’s oldest stock exchange, has evolved from informal trading beneath a banyan tree in Mumbai into a technology-driven marketplace accessible to investors through smartphones.
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of BSE, Sundararaman Ramamurthy, disclosed this while receiving a delegation of international journalists on a familiarization tour of the exchange’s historic trading hall.
Ramamurthy said the 151-year-old exchange emerged from a group of traders who conducted stock transactions under a banyan tree, noting that India has a documented history of stock trading spanning more than 200 years.
He said early evidence of securities trading could be found in newspaper advertisements placed by buyers and sellers seeking to transact in stocks.
According to him, the informal trading association later became the Native Share and Stock Brokers Association before evolving into the modern stock exchange.
He explained that the hall where the journalists were received once housed BSE’s iconic trading ring, where brokers executed transactions through verbal bids and hand signals before electronic trading transformed the market.
“Today there is no trading ring,” Ramamurthy said, explaining that trading had moved from the exchange floor to brokerage offices, then investors’ computers and, ultimately, smartphones.
He said India’s investor base had grown significantly, with about 260 million unique investor accounts currently participating in the securities market.
However, Ramamurthy noted that the figure remained relatively small compared with India’s population of more than 1.3 billion, indicating substantial room for further expansion.
“There is a long way to go for our markets in terms of growth,” he said.
The BSE chief also said the exchange had evolved beyond its traditional role as a platform for buying and selling securities, stressing the importance of trust, regulation and transparency in sustaining investor confidence.
“What it has resulted in is that this place is no longer a simple stock exchange. It is a temple of trust,” he said.
Ramamurthy added that stock exchanges play an important role in national development by channeling household savings into productive investments that provide capital for businesses and support broader economic growth.
