General News
From Banyan Tree To Smartphones, BSE Marks 151 Years Of India’s Market Revolution
By Iyojo Ameh
The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Asia’s oldest stock exchange, has traced its 151 year evolution from informal stock trading beneath a banyan tree in Mumbai to a technology driven marketplace now accessible to millions of investors through computers and smartphones.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of BSE, Sundararaman Ramamurthy, gave the account while addressing a delegation of international journalists during a familiarisation tour of the exchange’s historic trading hall.
Ramamurthy said the BSE originated from a group of traders who gathered under a banyan tree to conduct securities transactions, eventually evolving into a formal trading association and, later, the modern stock exchange.
He said India’s securities market has a history stretching back more than 200 years, citing newspaper advertisements from the early period in which buyers and sellers publicly sought opportunities to trade securities.
According to him, the informal association eventually became the Native Share and Stock Brokers Association before developing into what is now the Bombay Stock Exchange.
He noted that the historic hall visited by the journalists once housed BSE’s iconic trading ring, where brokers executed transactions through verbal bids, gestures and hand signals before electronic trading transformed the market.
“Today there is no trading ring,” Ramamurthy said, explaining that trading had moved from the exchange floor to brokerage offices, computers and, increasingly, smartphones.
The BSE chief said India now has about 260 million unique investor accounts participating in the securities market, describing the figure as significant but still modest relative to the country’s population of more than 1.3 billion.
“There is a long way to go for our markets in terms of growth,” he said.
Ramamurthy also emphasised the broader role of stock exchanges in building confidence in the financial system, saying BSE had evolved beyond being simply a platform for buying and selling securities.
“What it has resulted in is this place is no longer a simple stock exchange. It is a temple of trust,” he said.
He explained that stock exchanges contribute to national development by mobilising household savings and directing capital towards productive economic activities, thereby supporting businesses, investment and economic growth.
The transformation of BSE, he said, mirrors India’s broader financial evolution, with traditional trading practices giving way to digital platforms that have significantly widened access to the capital market.