The Initial Public Offering (IPO) committee of National Stock Exchange (NSE) has selected Rothschild & Co as the independent advisor to oversee the IPO process, the bourse said in a statement on Thursday. The France-based financial advisory firm will select book-running lead managers, legal counsels, and other intermediaries for NSE’s IPO. 

The announcement comes almost a week after the stock exchange’s board gave its nod for the public offering following the Indian market regulator’s issuance of no-objection certificate for the IPO, marking an end to a decade-long wait to get listed. 

From Oversight to Execution

Key responsibilities of Rothschild include developing an objective evaluation framework, defining clear selection criteria, and managing all stages of the selection process—from documentation and clarifications to back‑off coordination and consolidation of evaluation feedback of internal stakeholders, as per the statement.

Clearing the Regulatory Deck

Early this month, a spokesperson of NSE had said that the company is expected to file the Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) with the markets regulator by March-April and plans to get listed in 8-9 months. The company had withdrawn its DRHP in 2016 due to the investigations on the unfair market access case, widely known as the colocation case. The company was alleged to have given preferential access to certain brokers between 2010 and 2014, enabling them to bypass other traders to reach the exchange servers faster.

NSE is the world’s largest derivatives bourse and is also the third-biggest player in the equity segment in terms of number of trades. For the quarter ended December, NSE reported a 37% on-year fall in its consolidated net profit at₹ 2,408 crore and a nearly 10% decline in revenue from operations at almost ₹3,925 crore. In the unlisted market, the stock traded at ₹2,075 and has a market capitalization of ₹5.14 lakh crore. The re-constituted IPO committee has six members – one chairperson (Tablesh Pandey) and four members (Ashishkumar Chauhan, Srinivas Injeti, G. Sivakumar, and Mamata Biswal).