Technology is affecting financial markets through various channels be it technology driven financial market platforms for fund raising (such as peer to peer lending, crowd funding), online access to investment products (e-KYC, online mart investment products, Robo-advisory, and online portfolio management), post-trade market for securities (through new database technologies such as blockchain and other distributed ledger technology), product and process innovation (such as algorithmic trading, algorithmic driven synthetic investment products, virtual currencies, digital payment gateways), etc.

With technology driven revolution in the financial markets, regulators are faced with the challenges as well as opportunities to evolve their functioning more effectively through adoption of new technology solutions.

In order to reap the opportunities provided by FinTech as also to deal with relevant risk and challenges, SEBI has setup a committee under the Chairmanship of Shri T.V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education. The other members of the committee are experts from various areas such as digital payments, e-brokerage, financing / investment platform, Products/Process Reengineering, Data analytics, eCommerce etc.

The Committee would examine, deliberate and advise SEBI on an ongoing basis on the following:

i. Recent and medium term trends (within next 5 years) in FinTech developments in securities market worldwide

ii. Opportunities and challenges from new FinTech solutions and its impact on Indian Securities Market.

iii. FinTech solutions for further widening and deepening of Indian securities market.

iv. Approach and framework for regulatory sandbox in Indian market conditions to facilitate adoption of FinTech and promote financial innovations

v. Preparing Indian securities market and regulatory framework to adopt to new FinTech solutions while promoting market integrity, market development, consumer protection and managing change, business models and market disruptions

vi. Assessing technological solutions for regulatory functions of SEBI viz. information management and data mining, risk management including cyber security, intermediary supervision, consumer protection, etc. through application of new technological solutions like application of distributed ledger technology, big data, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine Learning etc.

vii. Technology capacity building by Indian securities market in general and SEBI in particular.