Mumbai, Sept 10: Rapid financial innovation must be matched by equally strong safeguards, Chairman of Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Tuhin Kanta Pandey said today.
As stock markets grow larger and more interconnected, vulnerabilities can spread just as quickly, demanding resilient infrastructure and sharper regulatory oversight, he cautioned.
Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026 here, Pandey underlined that “Growing fast and growing safe are not competing ambitions. A market can grow sustainably when innovation is accompanied by trust, and trust is sustained by resilience.”
The SEBI Chairman noted that India’s securities markets have grown rapidly on digital onboarding, electronic payments, robust clearing and settlement, and transaction traceability.
On technology-led finance, he said, “These technologies point towards greater intelligence, programmability, and computational power. Yet there is a common question: how do we make innovation scalable without making risk scalable at the same pace?”
Regarding quantum readiness, Pandey said that migration to quantum-safe systems “cannot begin after the threat becomes real,” calling for crypto-agility and a phased transition to post-quantum cryptography, already embedded in SEBI’s cyber resilience framework in line with India’s National Quantum Mission. (BVI)
