Starting from scratch in 1992, Chitra Ramkrishna helped set up the country's largest bourse, the National Stock Exchange. As its newest MD and CEO, she is looking to build on that success
Award: Women Leader of the Year
Chitra Ramkrishna
CEO & MD, National Stock Exchange
Age: 5O
Interests outside of work: Carnatic music; likes to play the veena
Why she won this award: For striking a delicate balance between the exchange’s commercial and regulatory roles and keeping NSE ahead of the pack with a high degree of professionalism, new
products and cutting-edge technology.
For someone who has never invested in equities, running the country’s largest stock exchange is as paradoxical as it gets.
But Chitra Ramkrishna, the 50-year-old managing director and CEO of National Stock Exchange (NSE), has always been comfortable with new challenges. Starting out as a chartered accountant, her first brush with finance came in 1985 when she joined the project finance division of Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI). Ramkrishna then had a stint at Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and returned to IDBI two years later. It was here that she honed her financial skills, working at the treasury and fixed income departments before coming into her own while marketing the trendsetting deep discount bonds.
Her talent was such that the late RH Patil, executive director of IDBI at the time, complimented the young Ramkrishna for her extraordinary work and her role in making the bond issue a success. “In a public sector organisation, a senior manager rarely had a conversation with his junior. What Dr Patil did was completely unheard of. I was inspired and motivated to push myself further. Dr Patil was a visionary and a thinker and never seeded any doubts in our minds,” Ramkrishna says of the man who is widely credited with creating NSE.
Not surprising, she soon found herself as one of the five handpicked by the late SS Nadkarni, who was then IDBI chairman, to set up NSE from scratch and create a counterforce to the powerful Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), which was then seen to be a closed club of brokers resistant to change.
The foundation stone
When Ramkrishna started her new assignment, she knew little about the business of bourses. Worse, the year was 1992 and Indian markets had gone through a bruising scandal, thanks to rogue trader Harshad Mehta. Brokers had become a tainted community and a new stock exchange was going to be up against a perception problem.
The government was keen to set up a stock exchange that would not have any of the problems witnessed by BSE, and would be seen as a professionally run bourse. The idea was to have a bourse that would conduct trading transparently and where price discovery would be clear and electronically driven. It was a tough ask.
The broking community too viewed NSE with some suspicion. When it was being set up, the brokers saw Ramkrishna as part of a team of bureaucrats who were trying to set up an institution that would never become a reality. What they had not reckoned with was the vision and determination of Nadkarni and Patil, which allowed the people on the job to execute the task independently.
Ramkrishna recalls a day when Nadkarni came to NSE’s office at Mahindra Towers in Mumbai’s Worli area to check on the progress. Those were the days of poor telephone connectivity; the BSE conducted trading under the open outcry system, where brokers would talk to each other and transact on the trading floor. If NSE was to take on the might of BSE, it would have to be with the help of satellite-based technology.
When asked by Nadkarni on when the exchange would be up and running, the team responded immediately: “In a few months.” Nadkarni was probably sceptical. But within just a few months, the NSE was functional. This drive set the benchmark for NSE and defined its culture, Ramkrishna says. She calls it “quick to market”. And, over the years, she developed a skill in execution that helped her build a reputation among the broking community.
Taking charge
Over 20 years later, on April 1, 2013, Ramkrishna took over at the corner room of the exchange she helped create, as its MD and CEO. This was a role played to perfection by her two predecessors—mentor and friend Ravi Narain, who led the exchange for 12 years, and Patil before him. Both are credited with creating a successful, professionally run and transparent stock exchange that effectively changed the rules of the game in India’s capital market.
“The entire team worked under Mr Narain’s supervision and he played a major role in grooming and mentoring all of us,” she says.
Stepping into such illustrious shoes was no small achievement, but Ramkrishna views her task with trademark professionalism, almost like a project she has to complete successfully.
While many feel the going will be smooth for her, given the strong foundations of the bourse and the fact that competition from new exchanges has waned, Ramkrishna, who was deputy managing director for many years, is not complacent. “There will be competition and we will have to take it seriously. There are challenges on a continuous basis,” she says.
(This story appears in the 01 November, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)