ITM Business School, Kharghar-Finance Department had organised a Virtual Industrial Visit to Securities and Exchange Board of India for the students of PGDM Finance batch 2019-2021 & batch 2020-2022 on Saturday, 17th October 2020. More than 250 Students were part of this Virtual visit. The visit was beneficial to the students as it provided extortionate knowledge about the functions and role of Securities and Exchange Board of India.
With sincere gratitude Dr Sarit Prava Das welcomed the SEBI authorities, Mr Arun Panigrahi, Manager in Investor Awareness Division, along with Mr Krishnanand Raghavan, Chief General Manager and Rashmi Sharma, Assistant Manager.
Our Anchor Mr Devashish Chouhan gave a brief introduction about our speaker Mr Arun Panigrahi. Our speaker has 6+ years of experience in securities market regulations. Mr Panigrahi pursued his bachelors in engineering from Birla Institute of technology and simultaneously completed one -year
internship at CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology as Research Intern. He then pursued MBA from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi. He was placed at Deutsche Bank as Analyst. After working for almost 2 years he switched to SEBI as Assistant Manager in January 2014. He held various positions in SEBI and simultaneously pursued bachelors in law from government law college, Mumbai.
Mr Arun Panigrahi elucidated the working of SEBI to the students by covering the following: He started with a small introduction about SEBI which was established as a financial body under Ministry of Finance 1988, but became operative from 4th April 1992 after an Act of Parliament was passed . Further he mentioned the various Acts of SEBI such as, The SEBI Act 1992, The Depositories Act 1996,
The Securities Contract Regulation Act 1956 & The Companies Act 2013. He also touched upon few mandatory objectives of the SEBI which are to protect the interest of investors, regulate and to develop the securities and commodities market. Mr Arun also mentioned the powers of SEBI that are: Legislative powers to make the regulations , Judicial Powers for adjudicating disputes/ passing orders & Executive powers for administrating the framed regulations and taking actions against entities violating the regulations.
Later he explained about the Indian Securities market, where equity, debt & mutual funds are the products on which trading is done. The players in Indian Securities Market are the issuers, the intermediaries & the investors. He also mentioned a few participants of Indian Securities Market, some of them are stock exchanges and brokers, depository participants and depositories, merchant bankers, transfer agents, bankers to an issue, portfolio managers, credit rating agencies, investment advisors etc.
Mr Arun explained in brief about the development of the Indian securities market. He clarified about the two divisions of the securities market Primary market & Secondary Market. Primary market involves Initial public offering wherein securities are sold for the first time. It helps in capital formation. Further, he explained the functions of both primary market and secondary market.
Mr. Arun Panigrahi proceeded further with the explanation of mutual funds. To quote him, “Mutual Funds are the most convenient vehicle for return-investors to invest. The right person should take the right scheme at the right time, then mutual funds are definitely right.”
What is a Mutual Fund - Investors pool their money with fund managers to invest in securities and generate returns that are passed back to the investors, he further added that persons in their 30s and 40s can opt for small cap and middle cap scheme with low funds invested as it has high risks but may give returns in long run, however people in 60s who are either retired or about to be retire should not opt for small cap schemes because they survive on their pension and this high risk scheme won’t be such beneficial for them, they can mainly invest in fixed deposits in public sector banks or in monthly investment scheme or in a dividend mutual fund.
Further, he elucidated the mutual fund structure in India, and also stated clearly that being finance students everyone must have strong knowledge about trading in the securities market. Moving with his slides the next topic was Commodities Derivative Market through which he explained briefly about commodities markets, the types of commodities that are traded in stock markets and the return on investments on these commodities. He added that commodity derivative markets are beneficial for its investor for price risk management and also helps in discovering the prices of future dates. Mr. Panigrahi shared his immense knowledge about the spot market and future market. As explained by him, spot market shows prices of today whereas future markets tell about the price of a commodity that is expected in the near future. With the help of some practical examples, he demonstrated a contract of a derivative.
He moved further with his next slide by saying that “this topic isn’t covered under any syllabus and never taught by professors but this is the reality of life and students should be able to understand this in-depth.” He discussed about security market frauds which can be conducted in three ways saying trade based, information based and miscellaneous. Insider trading (unpublished price sensitive information), price manipulation, collective investment scheme, 1992 scam were some of the examples of the frauds cited by him.
As said, “Every action has Consequences” he stated the actions taken in the event of frauds i.e. administrative warning, enquiry for cancellation or suspension, debarring proceedings, levy of penalty, prosecution and reference. He also asked students to have awareness of legal consequences as they are going to be finance experts in different sectors.
As being the Manager of Investor Awareness Division, he also guided students about Grievance Redressal that SEBI provides. Anyone having grievances can go to the www.scores.gov.in website and file a complaint which can be viewed online. It also has a mobile app called SCORE.
Before concluding the session, He expounded about numerous departmental functions in SEBI like Corporate Finance, Economic and policy analysis, Enforcement, Human Resources, legal affairs, Investigation, Investment Management, International affairs. He also mentored on the career options in SEBI and the process of selection.
He opened it for a Q & A round where students asked many queries and Mr. Panigrahi answered them with utmost grace. In the session, students gathered a lot of knowledge about the working of SEBI and also about legal aspects of securities market. Mr Arun was exultant with the students and kept the session very lively and interactive.
The session was ended by the vote of thanks by Dr.(CA) Pinky Agarwal to Mr. Arun Panigrahi, Mr Krishanand Raghavan and Ms Rashmi Sharma, who devoted their valued time to the ITM Business School, Navi Mumbai.
We are thankful to Department of Finance for the successful virtual industrial visit of SEBI and connecting with the SEBI Authorities.
