SEBI's Buch Calls For Speeding Up IPO Approvals Using AI

The Securities Exchange Board of India, with an eye to improving ease of doing business, plans to speed up the process of approving initial public offerings through the use of artificial intelligence, Chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch said on Thursday.

"We also have a dozen projects using AI which are in the works at SEBI. Half of those will speed up our approval process and half of them will speed up our supervision process. We will now actively use AI," Buch said at the Global Fintech Festival 2024.

Buch said that the market watchdog is carefully looking at the ageing and pendency of IPO applications.

"We have been focusing on saying that if the fintech industry has reached a certain level of maturity and now they want to go for an IPO and private equity investors want to exit and markets are buyout ... we should not be wasting time in giving approvals," Buch said at the Global Fintech Festival 2024.

The regulator has been tracking pending IPO applications from the last 12 quarters.

In March 2022, when SEBI started tracking these applications, there was a huge number of IPO papers pending for more than three months, but today that number has come down to only eight, Buch said. This is also because most of these papers are pending judicial intervention or another regulator approval, she said.

"This effort on our part continues that we need to do what we can to speed up our approvals," Buch said.

This has come as there is so much opportunity in the market and companies are awaiting approvals, Buch said, adding that any of the fintechs coming to register in this market will also see that the speed of approval will be there by the SEBI.

On making compliance easier, Buch said that the SEBI had actually put in place 16 working groups for ease of doing business.

Of the 317 recommendations from various people which are in various stages of implementation, SEBI has already accepted 71% of these recommendations, which will be taken up in September.

Almost 20% of these recommendations are under process while 10% were not accepted.

On the use of technology, Buch also said that the regulator is processing feedback on its consultation papers in an automated manner.

This adoption of technology has allowed SEBI to be far more extensive with its consultation papers.