GFF2026: India’s exchanges eye global ambitions as AI, scale and resilience reshape market infrastructure

India’s market infrastructure is entering a new phase as rising investor participation, faster trading systems, product innovation and artificial intelligence create both opportunities and new risks, the heads of the country’s leading exchanges said at a panel discussion.

Speaking on India’s potential to emerge as a global financial and commodities market, Praveena Rai, MD & CEO of MCX, said the country needs to strengthen its position as a price-discovery and price-setting market.

“Commodity markets tend to be more globally oriented. India is a large economy and we are growing fast. However, we do have dependence on imports and exports, which creates its own variations and barriers,” Rai said.

She said stronger domestic benchmarks could help India establish greater influence over global pricing. “Having strong Indian benchmarks on price discovery can help us establish ourselves better in terms of commodities,” Rai said. “India needs to become more of a price-setting market. We are a large market, and that gives us the opportunity to have stronger price discovery here.”

Rai also pointed to agricultural products and other markets catering to domestic investors as areas of opportunity, while arguing that Indian market infrastructure could increasingly be offered to a global audience.

“But there is one thing that we really need to focus on—how do we get to a mature, sophisticated market?” she said. “Whenever you introduce products or want to attract more participants, you have to make sure that the market is ready.”

AI brings new opportunities, but also new risks

The rapid adoption of AI, meanwhile, is creating a very different set of challenges.

Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD & CEO of NSE, said there is no point claiming that markets are fully prepared for AI. “One thing is nobody is ready. That’s a fact,” Chauhan said. “AI is going to play a very important role.”

Chauhan said AI systems essentially make predictions based on available information, but those predictions cannot automatically be treated as accurate. “What AI does is predict what comes next. But predictions are not necessarily correct,” he said.

He warned that the technology could also amplify misinformation and create new threats to market integrity. Recalling an instance in which his name, image and videos were used to create fake content, Chauhan said the episode showed how quickly such threats can emerge. “People are now able to create extremely convincing audio and video using AI. You may not know what is real and what is fake,” he said.

The problem, he added, goes beyond individual cases of impersonation. “People have to understand what is real and what is not. We need to create that line between truth and falsehood.”

According to Chauhan, regulators and institutions will have to keep pace with the technology. “The institutions and regulators are often behind the curve,” he said, adding that the use of AI would become increasingly widespread.

“The question is not whether AI is going to be used. It will be. The crucial question is how accurately and responsibly it is going to be used.”

For Latika S. Kundu, MD & CEO of MSEI, collaboration between market infrastructure institutions will become increasingly important as the ecosystem expands. “To be able to collaborate, there has to be a common objective,” Kundu said. “There has to be a common consensus and a common objective towards which we move forward.”

Trust, she said, has to underpin that collaboration. “The blueprint becomes very clear when the objective is clear. But underlying that is also trust. Trust between all these entities is extremely important,” she said.

Kundu, however, stressed that collaboration should not come at the cost of competition. “There needs to be seamless integration while maintaining healthy competition,” she said. “That is what will ensure innovation, deeper markets and greater trust.”

The trust, she added, cannot be restricted to individual institutions. “It has to extend across the entire ecosystem.”

Sundararaman Ramamurthy, MD & CEO of BSE, said adaptability would be one of the defining characteristics of successful exchanges as competition increasingly becomes global. “The most important thing for an exchange going forward is adaptability,” Ramamurthy said. “It is not just within one country anymore. People are competing with each other globally because capital can flow anywhere.”

“The future exchange has to be flexible and adaptive,” he added.

Ramamurthy also argued that India’s experience in building digital and market infrastructure could be extended beyond conventional capital markets.

“India’s capital markets are a miracle in many ways,” he said, pointing to the trust that allows investors to put their savings into companies despite the country’s relatively low per-capita income compared with developed economies.

“That trust is very difficult to create but very, very easy to lose,” Ramamurthy said. India’s next opportunity, he said, is to use the systems and methodologies developed in financial markets to bring greater efficiency to other asset classes.

“How do we create efficient markets for bonds, commodities, gold, electricity and water?” he asked. “The ambition should not just be to make the capital markets faster. It should be to use the infrastructure we have created to improve the lives of our people.”

Building scale without compromising resilience

The panellists also highlighted the growing importance of investor education as market participation expands beyond India’s major cities.

Rai said product innovation must remain within a robust risk-management framework. “Every product that we bring in goes through a framework involving the regulator and various stakeholders,” she said. “We look not only at the product itself, but also at the various risks that it brings.”

Kundu said technology could also make investor communication more useful and personalised. “Rather than giving an investor a 15-page document that nobody really reads, AI can potentially identify the larger risk factors and explain what those risks could mean for that particular investor’s portfolio,” she said.

“There will be tools very soon that cater to these needs,” she added. “That will further enhance what we are creating today: awareness, along with trust, and a much more long-term market.”

The final challenge, the panellists said, is to maintain reliability and resilience as participation and transaction volumes continue to rise. For Kundu, scale cannot come at the expense of resilience. “When we look at scale, performance and resilience, all of them have to be at the highest standards,” she said.

Chauhan agreed that exchanges must prepare for tomorrow’s volumes rather than merely optimise for today’s. “We have very large numbers of investors and very large numbers of transactions. The systems have to be designed not just for today’s numbers but for what the market will become,” he said.

But speed alone is not enough. “For me, the larger issue is resilience,” Chauhan said. “Today, systems are expected to work continuously.”

Ramamurthy similarly said exchanges must collectively prepare for a market that is becoming increasingly central to India’s economy. “We need to keep learning from each other. We need to work together, train together and collectively prepare for what is coming,” he said.