From floor trading to free cash flow: What NSE achieved in 32 year journey — numbers tell story

The National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) is set to launch its initial public offering (IPO) on September 17, taking the country’s largest exchange into the public markets after more than three decades of change. NSE's Rs 22,568 crore maiden stake sale will be largest IPO in India's financial sector and second largest after Hyundai Motors India.

As the exchange prepares to list, its MD and CEO Ashish Kumar Chauhan looked back at NSE’s journey from the era of floor-based trading to a technology-driven market infrastructure institution with significant scale and strong free cash flow generation. While addressing the media in Delhi, Chauhan said that the numbers show how sharply India’s capital markets have changed over this period.

From market capitalisation to user growth
When NSE began operations, India’s total market capitalisation stood at around Rs 4 lakh crore. Currently, it is near Rs 480 lakh crore, a nearly 120-fold increase. Chauhan said exchanges across major global markets, including the US, Australia, Japan, the UK and Europe, once operated through floor trading, while India moved quickly towards technology-led markets as the economy and investor participation expanded.

The growth has also been reflected in the number of unique users, which has risen from around 1 million to 132.37 million (as of June 30, 2026) over NSE’s three-decade journey.

Billions of orders in a trading day
Chauhan said the scale of NSE’s technology infrastructure can be seen in its trading volumes. According to him, NSE executes an average of around 2,200 crore orders during 375 minutes, or 6.15 hours, of trading. This works out to nearly 5.87 crore orders every minute.

He compared this with India’s digital payments ecosystem, noting that the country records around 2,400 crore UPI transactions in a month, underscoring the scale of the throughput handled by the exchange’s technology infrastructure.

How technology changed the exchange business
Chauhan said the shift from physical trading floors to electronic markets has also changed the economics of launching new products. According to him, exchanges do not necessarily need significant investments to create every new asset class. Once the underlying technology and product infrastructure are in place, relatively limited changes can enable the launch of new products.

He added, however, that an exchange cannot independently decide which products or asset classes can be introduced, and that regulatory approval remains a key requirement. This technology-led model has allowed NSE to build a diversified market ecosystem spanning equities, derivatives and other products, while also extending its role into newer areas such as the Social Stock Exchange.

NSE’s footprint across India
Chauhan said NSE now has a reach across more than 99 per cent of India’s 19,300 pin codes. According to the exchange, participants are present in all but 28 pin codes. The expansion has taken the exchange’s footprint well beyond Mumbai and other major cities, reflecting a shift from capital market activity being concentrated among institutional and urban investors to one that is increasingly accessible to millions of retail participants across the country.

NSE’s upcoming IPO marks another point in this journey. After more than 30 years of building technology infrastructure, expanding investor access and establishing a dominant position in India’s capital markets, the exchange is now preparing to enter the public markets itself. NSE’s three-decade journey tracks the digitisation and expansion of India’s capital markets.