The lab where it all began

Rewind to the mid-1990s. India’s financial markets were paper-bound, slow, and sealed off from most of the population. Jignesh Shah, an engineer with a sharp eye for structural inefficiency and innovation to fill the gaps, did not look at that landscape and see problems to complain about. He saw problems to solve, at scale. In 1995, he founded Jignesh Shah Financial Technologies India Ltd, now known as 63 moons technologies, and the company became his laboratory for everything that followed. His vantage point was hard-earned: having been part of the effort to digitise the Bombay Stock Exchange’s trading systems, he had seen the chaos from the inside, the opacity, the inefficiency, the limited access that kept ordinary participants on the margins. FTIL was his answer. Not a tweak to what existed, but an entirely new architecture built around intellectual property and technology-led solutions that could make financial participation genuinely equitable. It was, in hindsight, the founding act of Indian fintech, though the word would not arrive for another two decades.

MCX: where commodities met their moment

Jignesh Shah‘s first landmark achievement came in 2003 with the launch of the Multi Commodity Exchange. Before MCX, commodity trading in India was fractured and informal, a patchwork of regional networks, volatile pricing, and little transparency. MCX changed all of that. Built on FTIL‘s proprietary technology, it introduced standardised futures contracts spanning gold, silver, crude oil, and agricultural produce, bringing structure and visibility to markets that had long operated in the dark. The results were not modest. Jignesh Shah MCX eventually went on to contribute close to 1 percent of India’s GDP, and when it became the first Indian exchange to list publicly in 2012, the IPO was met with extraordinary demand, a market verdict on what had been built. More than the numbers, though, MCX represented a philosophical shift. Farmers, traders, and investors across the country could now access a structured, transparent marketplace. Commodities stopped being a gamble and became a genuine tool for economic planning and stability.

IEX: turning the lights on, literally

Jignesh Shah‘s appetite for solving systemic problems did not stop at commodities. By 2008, he had turned his attention to one of India’s most persistent infrastructure failures: chronic power shortages. Rolling blackouts were a fact of daily life across large parts of the country, and energy distribution was tangled in bureaucratic inefficiency. The Indian Energy Exchange, built on FTIL‘s cost-effective, high-performance platforms, created a real-time marketplace for electricity. Utilities could now buy and sell power dynamically, matching supply to demand in ways the old system simply could not. The impact was immediate and concrete, states that had previously been power-starved gained access to a functioning, market-driven mechanism for managing energy flow. It was a different domain from commodities, but the instinct behind it was identical: identify a broken system, build the technology infrastructure it needed, and let markets do the rest.

MCX-SX and the architecture of interconnection

With MCX-SX, Shah extended his model into currencies, equities, futures, options, and debt instruments. He did not borrow from existing blueprints, he disrupted them. His technology stack was robust, accessible, and fully compliant, and it lowered the barriers that had historically kept retail investors on the sidelines of financial markets. The combined effect of MCX, IEX, and MCX-SX was something greater than the sum of its parts. India’s exchange ecosystem shifted from a collection of siloed operations into a genuinely interconnected infrastructure. Trading volumes grew significantly, liquidity deepened, and transparency became an expectation rather than an exception. Shah’s method throughout was consistent: build once, engineer it well, and design it to scale. These were not off-the-shelf platforms. They were custom-built for the specific demands of efficiency, security, and reach, and they anticipated fintech’s direction long before the industry caught up.

Ten exchanges in just ten years

What made Jignesh Shah‘s story genuinely unprecedented was what happened when he took the model global. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, he founded 10 exchanges in 10 years, each one tailored to a different asset class, regulatory environment, and regional context. The Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange, a joint venture with the UAE government that positioned Dubai as a commodity trading hub for the Middle East. The Singapore Mercantile Exchange followed in 2008, its opening bell rung by the then Deputy Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, one of the most demanding regulators in the world, a detail that spoke to the credibility Shah had built. The Bahrain Financial Exchange launched in 2009, introducing electronic trading for Sukuk and cash instruments in the Gulf. And Bourse Africa, formerly GBOT, based in Mauritius, brought risk management tools to economies across the African continent that had long lacked the infrastructure for structured trading.

The art of building trust across borders

None of these international ventures were transplants of a single formula. Each one required Jignesh Shah to navigate a distinct regulatory landscape, build trust with local governments and institutions, and ensure that the resulting exchange met both regional needs and universal standards. His ability to partner, with governments, regulators, and local stakeholders, without diluting the quality of what was being built was perhaps the most underappreciated dimension of his global expansion. Most innovators struggle to launch one exchange. Shah launched ten, across multiple continents and asset classes, exporting Indian-built technology to disrupt global norms and, in the process, integrating India more deeply into international financial flows.

A legacy that keeps compounding

The ecosystems Jignesh Shah built generated millions of jobs, from technology developers and compliance professionals to traders and logistics operators, fostering entrepreneurship in an India that predated the startup boom by a decade. The World Economic Forum’s recognition of him as a Young Global Leader was a fitting acknowledgement, though the more enduring measure of his impact is structural rather than ceremonial. Today, as Chairman Emeritus and mentor at Jignesh Shah 63 moons, Shah focuses on cultivating the next generation of leaders, ensuring the revolution he started does not depend on him to continue. What his story ultimately demonstrates is that the most durable kind of innovation does not chase trends. It builds systems, patient, scalable, principled systems, that keep delivering value long after the original builder has stepped back. Shah did not just transform exchanges. He redefined what Indian finance could be, and proved that genuine genius is measured not by the noise it makes, but by the infrastructure it quietly leaves behind.