Sebi proposes new data-sharing policy for intermediaries, MIIs, to facilitate ease-of-doing business and data privacy

The Sebi Market Data Advisory Committee (MDAC) has suggested that the regulator share only data that is under its ownership.

The market regulator has proposed a new data-sharing framework for intermediaries and other data sources.

The current data-sharing policy (DSP), which has been put in place to make data available for a variety of requirements such as analytics projects and research activities, was formulated in 2018.

In a consultation paper released on October 8, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has said that the regulator has several data sharing requests till date and, based on the experience from handling the requests, it was felt that the current policy needs to be modified to fix some gaps and to make the data sharing process less cumbersome.

Under the proposed policy, data will be segregated into two baskets: data that can be shared with the public and data that cannot be shared with the public.

The first basked will contain only aggregate and analysed data, which either will be data that is publicly available on the websites of MIIs or will be be data that is voluminous or needs further processing and therefore MIIs may charge a fee to make this available.

The second basket will have more personal information such as KYC information/trade logs/holding details of an entity/individual etc with the identity of the entity/individual. This would also include anonymised data that could be used to identify an individual/entity directly or indirectly.

The Sebi Market Data Advisory Committee (MDAC) has suggested that the regulator share only data that is under its ownership. The data generated by the market infrastructure institutions (MIIs) should be shared by the MIIs guided by their individual data-sharing policy.

The committee also suggested that each of these organisations have policies for data collection, processing, storage, dissemination and sharing to ensure that there is a balance struck between data privacy and providing access to data.

Given these suggestions, the regulator has proposed a new framework for sharing data for research/analysis, which will promote democratisation, data privacy and data accountability simultaneously.