India’s stock exchanges, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) remained completely unaffected by the CrowdStrike cybersecurity update that shut down systems equipped with Microsoft Windows globally. This was unlike their global peers like the London Stock Exchange which was impacted by the outage.
How much do Indian stock exchanges and regulators spend on IT?
The NSE spends ₹570 crore on IT costs, according to a report by Business Today, which adds that this is extremely modest compared to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which spends ₹6,556 crore, NASDAQ, which spends ₹1,949 crore, and the The Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX), with the highest figure of ₹6,807 crore.
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NSE’s total costs amounted to ₹3,036 crore, compared to NASDAQ’s total cost of ₹23,734 crore and the HKEX’s ₹69,313 crore.
However, the NSE made a total revenue of ₹12,692 crore, while NASDAQ’s total revenue was ₹32,574 crore and the HKEX had a total revenue of ₹171,575 crore.
How much does India’s market regulator Sebi spend on IT?
Sebi’s yearly IT expenditure was Rs. 93 crore, which is much lower than Australia’s ASIC, which was at Rs. 205 crore and Singapore’s MAS, which was at Rs. 420 crore.
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Since the Indian exchanges and regulator spend much lesser on IT than their global peers and yet, still remained unaffected, it reflects what Sanjeev Sanjyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), wrote on X.
“This is why genetic diversity is important. A unified, interconnected global system is a bad idea. A less interconnected system may appear inefficient but will be more resilient. This is an important conclusion of the Complex Adaptive Systems based approach to AI regulation,” he wrote.
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Sanyal had suggested a framework for AI regulation, recommending the introduction of a new specialist AI regulator with a wide-ranging mandate and a national registry of algorithms, the report read.
“AI systems function like CAS, with components that interact and evolve in unpredictable ways,” he wrote in his EAC-PM research paper. “This complexity can trigger butterfly effects, where small changes lead to significant and unforeseen consequences.”
