Sebi looking at multiple measures to reduce costs of regulation: Pandey

Sebi chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey on Thursday said the capital markets regulator is looking at reducing the costs of regulation through multiple interventions. The efforts include forming a special committee under the chairmanship of Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran to assess the impact of regulatory moves, and also work by the Centre for Regulatory Studies, which is coming up as a centre of excellence at the National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM), he said. Sebi's Department of Economic and Policy Analysis (DEPA) is working in this direction, Pandey said. Terming this as a ''nascent'' subject, Pandey said there is a need to do a regulatory impact assessment, which will involve studying policy outcomes with evidence at hand. ''Cost efficiency of all our measures is important,'' Pandey said, adding that a high cost can make us uncompetitive. The career bureaucrat-turned-capital markets regulator said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had first mentioned undertaking such efforts some time back. When pointed out that the Reserve Bank has also marked this as a priority area, and if the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) has discussed this, he replied in the affirmative. Sebi's approach has been to encourage innovation while remaining vigilant about market integrity and investor protection, he said, maintaining that innovation cannot be risk-free. He said there is also a need to study artificial intelligence-driven risks from a capital markets perspective, and also exhorted researchers to partner with regulatory bodies. Pandey said there is also a need to work on improving access to financial services for the people. Meanwhile, when asked about the outage at NSDL earlier this month, which impacted trade settlements, Pandey said it was a technical glitch, and added that the usual protocols around root cause analysis and effecting short, medium and long-term solutions will kick in.