Ashishkumar Chauhan, the interim chief executive officer of BSE Ltd, Asia’s oldest stock exchange and one of the two national bourses in India, has been named as the managing director and CEO by the BSE board. In April this year, Madhu Kannan, the professional face of the Bombay Stock Exchange, resigned to join Tata Sons.
According to a BSE statement, necessary regulatory approval from SEBI has been received for the appointment.
Chauhan joined BSE as the deputy CEO in 2009 and has been the interim chief executive since May 2012 when Kannan moved out. At BSE, he has played a key role in helping Kannan bring about significant change, especially in terms of technology upgradation, and worked closely with the team to develop new products.
Before joining BSE, he had worked as the president and group CIO of Reliance Industries.
“Since Chauhan worked with BSE before, it is advantageous. He has strong leadership qualities and is extremely focused. I thoroughly support this decision and we can expect the trading volume of BSE to improve,†said Ramesh S Damani, member of the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Chauhan holds a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay (1989) and a PGDBM from IIM Calcutta (1991). He is a member of the board of governors of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing (IIITDM), Jabalpur, and serves on Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) and PNG on Information Technology besides the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (SEBI) Primary Market Advisory Committee (PMAC).
The BSE board had appointed the headhunting firm Egon Zender International to look for the next chief executive. The same search agency was involved when the BSE brought in Kannan in 2009 as the stock exchange faced stiff challenge against its younger peer National Stock Exchange. Chauhan was also one of the shortlisted candidates at that time besides NSE’s CTO Ravi Apte and ML Soneji, the then COO & acting CEO of BSE.
Kannan had joined BSE in May 2009 from Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he was the managing director (strategy & business development) based in New York. This was nine months after Rajnikant Patel resigned abruptly from the role of CEO in August 2008. It was also a period when the stock market saw a sharp downward swing after the global financial crisis – hitting the bottom in March 2009.
Kannan’s appointment as the chief of BSE was seen as a big move to bring in independent professionals to lead BSE and he had brought in new faces at senior positions at the bourse. He quit to join Tata Sons, the holding company of the diversified business conglomerate, as the group head of business development.
BSE counts among its investors Deutsche Börse, Singapore Exchange, Aditya Birla PE and Argonaut Ventures, among others.
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(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)
