THE BEST ADVICE I EVER

GOT
JIGNESH SHAH
Chairman and Group CEO,
Financial Technologies Ltd ;
Vice chairman , MCX Ltd
JIGNESH SHAH
Chairman of Financial Technologies Ltd.,
 Biography
• For a middle class man, who was born and brought up in
Kandivli, a Mumbai suburb, Shah's journey easily resembles a
Bollywood style rags-to-riches potboiler.
• His father Prakash Shah was an iron and steel trader.
• Jignesh Shah graduated as a software engineer from Mumbai
University.
• He started his career as an executive in the Bombay Stock
Exchange.
• On April 1998 , Jignesh Shah-led Financial Technologies (India)
Ltd (FTIL) was incorporated as a company in Chennai. It
overtime became a giant with nearly 40 subsidiaries.
• Jignesh Shah changed the dynamics of the Indian financial
markets by enabling trade routes within India through trading
technology for financial exchanges. His group was the only
Indian company to have established electronic silk & spice
routes across continents right from Africa, to Middle-East, to
South-East Asia.
• Under Mr. Jignesh Shah’s leadership, the Group launched
Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX), India's first
commodity exchange in 2003 and is currently world’s 6th
largest commodity futures exchange as per the Futures
Industry Association (FIA), 2009.
 AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

US-India Businessman of the Ye Indian Express Innovation Aw

ar ard
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

Hall of Fame Young Global Leader

 AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Awa Rotary international Global Soci

rd al Entrepreneur Award
 THE BEST ADVICE JIGNESH SHAH EVER
HAD
At the age of twenty four, after finishing my engineering from
Mumbai University , I joined the Bombay Stock Exchange,
where I was part of a team responsible for designing and
implementing the online trading platform.we were all young
engineering graduates working overtime to understand the
outcry trading systems and to devise a plan for screen based
trading.
I vividly remember that at the BSE's Phiroze Jeejeebhoy
towers, there was a huge processing room where we would
often end up spending a lot of our time. One day ,I came
across a very old signboard, which must have been around
forty to forty five years old, that read: ' Results matter not the
 Continued......
These words shook me from the core. I realised that however hard you
may work and whatever extra effort you may put into your work,
what mattered ultimately was the outcome. Hard work is nullified if
not accompanied by results. Infact having a result oriented approach
that differentiates them from the rest.
The second piece of advice came from the former MD of the National
Stock Exchange(NSE), R H Patil, I was thirty -seven then. The
commodity bourse, MCX , which FTIL promoted, was in direct
competition with NCDEX,an exchange promoted by leading institutions
like NSE, LIC ,NABARD and other domestic institutions. I knew Patil
from my early struggling days when he gave us(FTIL) a break as a
vendor for the securities trading platform. I was a bit upset with
NCDEX's ways of doing business.
 Continued....
One day I went to meet Patil to tell him about some of the practices the
competitor was resorting to in the market.
Patil advised me: ' Just don't deviate from your plan of action.
Continue doing the right thing, the way you are doing now. One day ,
the world will notice.' Patil's encouraging words solidified my belief in
not compromising on my principles and helped me stay focused on my
plan. The rest is history. In a short span of time, MCX not only overtook
NCDEX in terms of market share, but now figures amongst the world's
top ten commodity exchange.

-As told to Anand Adhikari