Over these years, while the two bourses had paid regulatory fees based on ‘premium value’ of options contracts, Sebi has demanded fees based on ‘notional value’.NSE has always been paying this fee based on premium value.
According to some estimates, BSE will have to pay regulatory fee worth about Rs 165 crore plus GST while for MCX the financial burden is limited to about Rs 1.8 crore plus GST.
Sebi on Friday had sent letters to the bourses demanding higher regulatory fee for the past 16 years after it was detected that there was a wrongful benchmarking of the regulatory fee by both the bourses.
The difference between premium value and notional value arise only in case of options contracts and not in case of cash and futures trading.
For example, a sensex options contract of 75,000 strike price is traded at Rs 100. Here Rs 75,000 is the notional value while the premium value is Rs 100. Currently, Sebi charges Re 1 per Rs 10 lakh turnover on all purchase and sales transactions in the securities other than debt securities. For debt securities, the charge is Re 0.25 per Rs 10 lakh worth of turnover, a report by ICICI Securities said.
On Monday, the BSE stock opened 15% down, slid further to an intra-day low at Rs 2,612 (down 18.6%) but recovered some ground to close at Rs 2,783, down 13.3%. MCX lost 6.5% in intra-day trade and closed 2.4% lower at Rs 4,066.
BSE on Monday said that it was “evaluating the validity, or otherwise, of the claim as per Sebi communication.” It also said that its estimated additional fee outgo may vary as the turnover data of United Stock Exchange (that was merged with BSE in FY16) was being collated by the bourse.
According to the I-Sec report, the rise in cost due to higher regulatory fee could shave off about 20% from BSE’s net profit for fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026. This higher cost could be managed by hiking trading costs by about 30%. “However, this sensitivity is subjective to estimates and has many levers of options volume growth, options cost growth and also development in premium to notional turnover,” the report said.
Higher regulatory fees could also increase BSE’s cost of operations by about Rs 260 crore for FY25 and by Rs 381 crore for FY26, analysts at I-Sec estimated.