In a span of ten years, engineer-turned-financial market wizard Jignesh Shah has already set up 14 exchanges across six continents and now Shah sees 100-times bigger business potential in a ‘startup ecosystem’. He feels startup ecosystem can create up to 10 crore jobs over the next decade.
Shah, who was forced out of all Sebi-regulated businesses under regulatory orders amid a multi-agency probe following a payment default of Rs 5,600 crore in 2013 at his smallest venture National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) that had a daily trading volume of Rs 200 crore as compared to more than Rs 1.20 lakh crore a day at his biggest exchange MCX.
However, Shah in a statement said that now he is confident that the time has come to start his second innings as court orders are vindicating him of all the charges one after another because none of the agency could prove even a single paisa of wrongdoing on his part, nor on part of his companies.
Now Shah wants to focus on a mentoring role and help youngsters with innovative ideas in order to live their entrepreneurship dreams by providing them a platform for “institutionalisation, globalisation and scaling up” of their ventures.
In an interview, Shah said, “When I set up exchanges and launched different products, I was creating and innovating for a very elite class in financial markets. Today, I want to create something for the masses. I want to be a coach now and nurture young entrepreneurs by putting in my entire experience and everything I have got to create world-class and world-scale institutions in all the verticals that we will work in. I want to create a big assembly line of future Jignesh Shah.”
The 52-year businessman said, “We now have a very conducive environment with a strong leadership under Prime Minister Narendra Modi that wants to promote entrepreneurship and job creation,” said Shah, now Chairman Emeritus of 63 Moons Technologies, the rechristened and re-booted version of the Financial Technologies India Ltd (FTIL), the erstwhile parent holding firm for all the exchanges founded by him.”
Shah, who hails from Gujarat and started his career as an engineer before setting up Financial Technologies in his early 20s, said that the ‘ecosystem’ would not be limited to the areas of technology and financial markets. He said, “It can be in agriculture, which attracts me the most today, it can be in genetics and it can be in robotics also. There won’t be any constraints.”
