The pandemic has induced major unprecedented changes in corporate behaviour, where physical meetings got replaced by video conferences.
“For instance, whether investor voices are adequately heard during virtual shareholder meetings, whether shareholders have sufficient opportunity to pose questions to the management, whether confidentiality & security concerns are adequately addressed in virtual Board meetings, etc. These issues need greater study if such virtual meetings are to become regular feature in the future,”Sebi chairman Ajay Tyagi said while speaking at an NISM event.
Since last year, apart from virtual shareholder meetings, virtual board meetings also became the norm.
Tyagi also said a defining trend of FY-21 has been increasing direct participation of retail investors in the equity markets.
“If we compare the average daily turnover in NSE in the cash segment in current financial year as compared to the last financial year – broad approximations for the post and pre-pandemic periods – we find that the share of institutional investors, corporate and partnership firms in the total turnover in this financial year has gone down by around 8.3% and correspondingly, shares of individuals & proprietary trading have gone up by 8.3% – around 6.6% increase in share of individuals and around 1.7% increase in share of prop trading,” Tyagi said.
The regulator said as on 31st Jan, 2021, the number of total demat accounts had already crossed 5 crore, an addition of more than 1 crore demat accounts in just a span of around 10 months.
