Nishant Shah, CEO comments on the Investor Survey 2025 carried out by Kantar in association with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Association of Mutual Funds in India, National Stock Exchange of India, BSE, National Securities Depository Ltd and Central Depository Services Ltd and released in September.
Speaking to Mint, Nishant Shah, CEO of Affinisio Technologies, described the combination as a dangerous one: a wave of new and inexperienced investors, with limited financial knowledge and fewer reliable sources of truth to draw on. Against a base of some 659 million smartphone users in India, he observed, fabricating and spreading financial misinformation through AI and social media has become alarmingly easy.
The article notes that, these concerns notwithstanding, the experts it canvassed expect India’s market to absorb the new wave of investors, and judge the overall impact to be a positive one.
What a wider investor base changes for issuers and intermediaries
A broader retail base changes the shape of the compliance problem rather than its nature. More first-time investors means more accounts, more small trades and a wider spread of holdings, and with it a larger population whose dealing has to be reconciled against insider lists, trading windows and pre-clearance rules.
Misinformation compounds that. Where a claim about a company circulates faster than the company’s own disclosure, the gap widens between what the market believes and what has actually been published. For a listed issuer the exposure is specific: unpublished price-sensitive information has to be identifiable, attributable and time-stamped, so that a later question about who knew what, and when, is answered from a record rather than from a reconstruction.
Affinisio(SDD) maintains that record as the structured digital database SEBI requires, and Affinisio(ETT) handles employee dealing across the same population — pre-clearance, window control and post-trade tracking.
Read the full article in Mint by Neha Joshi below – Forty million new investors are coming—India’s stock markets won’t be the same
Coverage published by Mint on 25 October 2025. Jonosfero International has rebranded to Affinisio Technologies in 2025. References to the firm have been updated to accurately reflect the current entity name; the publication’s own links are articles as originally published.
