Biggest Indian exchange’s CEO said to quit months before IPO

Mumbai: Chitra Ramkrishna, 53, has resigned as the chief executive officer of the National Stock Exchange of India months before the exchange prepares to go public, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ramkrishna resigned due to differences with several board members on the future of the exchange, said the people, who asked not to be identified as they are not authorised to speak publicly. Managing Director J. Ravichandran is set to be appointed the new CEO, they said. An NSE spokesman declined to comment on the changes when reached by phone.

The NSE appointed bankers including Citigroup Inc and Morgan Stanley in August, as the nation’s largest exchange prepared to go public early next year. The NSE will file a draft offer document with the market regulator for a domestic listing by January, it said in a statement in June.

“The market won’t take a bearish call on the resignation,” said Chinmay Madgulkar, an analyst at Taurus Asset Management Co in Mumbai. “NSE is an institution and no person is greater than the institution.”

The bourse plans to list so it can give shareholders a chance to exit, Ramkrishna said in an interview in July. In the past two decades she helped grow the NSE into the exchange leader in India, with an 82 per cent market share.

Only woman

Ramkrishna took over as CEO in April 2013 after serving as co-managing director. She was working at the state-run Industrial Development Bank of India, or IDBI, after earning degrees in commerce and an accountancy in Mumbai, where she was brought up after being born in Chennai.

In 1992, she and four other technocrats were selected to join a team to build the first nationwide exchange. Ramkrishna was the only woman, picked because of her experience at IDBI in the 1980s working on a blueprint for a national regulatory agency that led to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, or SEBI.

Last month, Ramakrishna became the first woman to be named chairperson of the World Federation of Exchanges.

Ravichandran’s appointment must be approved by SEBI.