Axis Trustee wants a seat at the risk table, not the sidelines
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mumbai: India’s trustee services industry has long operated in the background. At Axis Trustee Services Ltd, an arm of private sector lender Axis Bank, the new chief executive is pushing to change that.After over two decades at Axis Bank, Rahul Choudhary moved to Axis Trustee Services as the chief executive in February 2025, bringing with him experience across wholesale banking, including credit, trade finance, and treasury.With this experience in mind, Choudhary now wants Axis Trustee to play a more active role in pre-empting defaults, instead of playing a passive role.Regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), a trustee acts as an intermediary between the issuer of securities and investors.
It keeps a tab on payments being made by companies to investors and takes legal actions to recover in case of defaults. Trustees earn fees paid by issues of securities.Regulatory changes have expanded trustees’ powers, including greater authority to inspect and access data, experts said.Choudhary said that the role of the trustee should entail ensuring the right clauses are included in the agreement and that the asset is closely monitored throughout.“We have been passive, not by design, but how the evolution happened across all trustees,” he said.Choudhary said he wanted to ramp up monitoring to the level of a bank, tracking early warning signals and analysing various datasets to take action before it happens."When I meet the regulators, they say that maybe you made yourself very passive,” he said.
“The moment I become an active trustee — the way it should be—I will ask the right questions, I will ensure that I monitor what I should have been doing. This will give comfort to
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