Capital market regulator Sebi has brought down the pending IPO applications in the last two years and has lined up projects using artificial intelligence to further reduce the time taken to process IPO applications.

Sebi chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch told the Global Fintech Fest on Thursday in Mumbai that the regulator keeps a “hawk’s eye” on this metric.

Sebi’s data shows that as of March 31, 2022, there were 19 public issue applications pending with the regulator for more than three months. This number has come down to eight as of July 31, 2024.

“When we started tracking this in March 2022, we had a very large number of IPO papers pending more than three months.

“Today we have just eight and most of those are in the realms of where there is either a judicial intervention or there is a regulatory approval pending from another fellow regulator and which is why they are still pending at our end,” said Buch.

She added that the number is expected to go down further with the application of AI.

“We have almost a dozen processes using AI which are in the works in Sebi. Half of those, roughly speaking, would be to speed up our approval process and half of them are roughly to improve the supervision process,” Buch said.

She said the regulator has been working on standardisation to bring down the cost of innovation.

“Whether you are talking to the NSE, BSE or MCX, it should be in the same file format so that cost of innovation comes down. We have been working very hard to make sure that standardisation happens within the market ecosystem to encourage low cost innovation in terms of fintech,” she said.

The regulator is also leaning on technology to bring down the time taken to assess market feedback on consultation. “We do a lot of consultation before we come up with circulars and regulations. Adoption of technology has allowed us to do far more consultation. For instance when we did a recent consultation paper on F&O we had some 6,000 responses.”

“Since it is all automated, we are really able to collate very speedily and assess as to what it is that the market is giving us feedback in terms of the nature of compliances that we should have in the first place,” she said.