Madhabi Puri Buch Background
Madhabi Puri Buch finished her studies at Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College before enrolling at IIM Ahmedabad for an MBA. She began her career with ICICI Bank as a project finance analyst before rising to executive director in 2011. She departed the firm after 20 years of service. She then moved to Singapore to run a private equity business named “Greater Pacific Capital LLP,” and then to Shanghai to work as a consultant for the New Development Bank.
Career with SBI
In 2017, she started working with SEBI. In 2021, Buch became the chairman of a newly formed technology committee. According to Business Standard, the Advisory Committee for Leveraging Regulatory and Technology Solutions (ALeRTS) was made up of seven people who looked at contemporary and technology components of market abnormalities to discover them faster.
Madhabi Puri Buch was sworn in as the new chairman of India’s Securities and Exchange Board, which oversees the country’s $3.3 trillion stock market ecosystem, on Tuesday. She has been appointed by the government for a three-year term, succeeding Ajay Tyagi, whose five-year term ended on Monday. She enters at a time when markets are shaky owing to the Russia-Ukraine war, and India’s largest-ever IPO, Life Insurance Corporation of India, is ready to go public. She presents Sebi with a slew of firsts. Buch is the country’s first female stock market regulator. She is also the youngest chairman, at 56 years old.
She is also the first non-IAS person to lead the markets watchdog since 2002, as well as the first person from the private sector. She did, however, serve as a Whole-Time Member of Sebi for more than 4.5 years, until October 4, 2021, a position just below the chairwoman.
Other important details
Buch worked as the Head of Business Development at the private equity company Greater Pacific Capital in Singapore and as a consultant for New Development Bank in Shanghai before joining Sebi as the sole female Whole Time Member in April 2017. She has also served on the boards of directors of various companies, including Max Healthcare, Zensar Technologies, and Innoven Capital. Agora Advisory, a consulting and incubation business, is also founded by her. She was a member of various committees as a Sebi Whole-Time Director, including the Market Regulation Department, Integrated Surveillance Department, Department of Economic & Policy Analysis, National Institute of Securities Markets, and IT Department.
She was named the chairman of Sebi’s secondary market committee in December after her five-year tenure concluded in October 2021. She strove to instill a culture of the broad use of new technologies and data among her younger colleagues during her previous term at the agency. In fact, she was the chair of a technological council that looked into ways to spot market irregularities early. She previously stated that her single greatest accomplishment was transforming Sebi into a tech-savvy regulator. Buch is noted for her data-driven decision-making style. She was a driving force behind significant reforms to mutual fund laws that benefitted investors.
These include lowering the cost of investing, even more, improving scheme categorization and disclosures, and adding more protections to debt plans. After the “yoga” crisis at the NSE exposed the exchanges’ governance processes, she must hit the ground running in her new post. Perhaps the most pressing duty is to assess the internal governance procedures at the exchanges.
