BSE under Ramamurthy cut costs, rebuilt its tech and relaunched index options

According to ETMarkets, BSE (Asia's oldest stock exchange) staged a turnaround after Sundararaman Ramamurthy became MD and CEO in January 2023, and its shares returned more than 14 times over three years. He says that with topline growth difficult he began with a Rs 100 crore cost-cutting exercise that targeted revenue leakages such as barter schemes, then filled vacancies, rationalised pay scales and restored appraisal cycles.

In his first three months he met nearly 350 brokers to ask what would make them trade more on BSE. The feedback drove a technology rebuild: peripheral systems were revamped, servers replaced and a new data centre created, with order-processing capacity scaled from 10 crore orders to 1,800 crore gross orders per second, and brokers able to handle up to 67,500 trades per second.

The inflection came in May 2023 with the relaunch of equity derivative contracts. Until then BSE was non-existent in index options and NSE was the only player. Sensex weekly options became the flagship product, supported by Bankex contracts and frequent recalibration of expiry days. By November 2025 BSE's share of index-option premium turnover was 28.4% and of notional turnover 44%, up from 13.1% and 24.5% a year earlier, according to Jefferies, which also said operating revenue had grown fourfold since FY23.

Participation rose from 28 brokers on day one to more than 550, including 435 foreign portfolio investors. Mutual fund shareholding rose from 0.3% to 10.4% and foreign institutional ownership from 8.4% to 16.7%. Transaction charges grew eightfold between FY23 and FY25, per B&K Securities, to nearly 60% of operating revenue.

Operating revenue up 4x since FY23 (Jefferies); index-option premium turnover share 13.1% to 28.4%; shares up over 14x in three years.

A cost clean-up came first because the revenue base could not grow quickly.

Talking directly to about 350 brokers aimed the tech roadmap at what brokers wanted.

Removing technology latency took away a competitive handicap and rebuilt broker confidence.

Relaunching index options, where NSE had no competitor, targeted a profit pool BSE had been absent from.

The CEO credits regulators for addressing level-playing-field concerns once they were satisfied with BSE's case.

Fix the cost base and the technology first, ask customers what would make them trade more, then relaunch the product where a dominant rival has no competition.

Jefferies projects a 28% compound annual growth rate in operating revenue over FY26 to FY28 and warns that Sensex options may face the same turnover constraints that limited NSE's flagship index after FY29. Co-location racks more than doubled in a year, with 70 to 90 more planned by end of FY26. Several revenue and margin figures are broker projections, not reported results.