Indonesia Looks Like India 15 Years Ago, Says Architect Behind India’s Market Tech

Key Takeaways

●	Veteran technologist Shuvam Misra says Indonesia today mirrors India before its capital-market acceleration.
●	OJK’s roadmap, IDX’s 2026 engine upgrade, and the government’s 8% growth target create conditions for rapid catch-up.
●	Liquidity, retail confidence, and entrepreneurial access to equity markets are the system’s most urgent gaps.
●	Coordinated reform—technology, regulation, and market behavior—can allow Indonesia to leapfrog India’s timeline.

“When I study Indonesia, I feel I am at home.”

Shuvam Misra

JAKARTA, Investortrust.id — For Shuvam Misra, a technology architect who has spent three decades building systems for India’s capital markets, Indonesia today looks uncannily like India on the eve of its own market breakthrough. And that, he argues, is not a warning—but an opportunity.

Speaking at the Investortrust Capital Market Forum 2025 in Jakarta on Thursday, the founder chairman of Remiges Technologies said Indonesia can compress into five to seven years the kind of transformation that took India decades to engineer, provided regulators, exchanges, brokers and technology players move in step.

India’s journey, he reminded the audience, was not an organic drift but a deliberate build-out of rules, infrastructure and investor participation.

“India’s big quantum leap did not happen over 20 or 30 years,” he said. “The phase where capital markets really became dominant took place over five to seven years. That should give Indonesia a lot of hope.”

Misra’s firm, Remiges, builds critical systems for all three Indian exchanges and both national securities depositories, and has worked with the country’s major brokerage houses. He has watched volumes, fraud patterns and regulatory responses evolve at close range.

“When I study Indonesia, I feel I am at home,” he said. “The journey looks very similar to India’s.”

To Misra, Indonesia in 2025 resembles India roughly 15 years ago: a market rich with potential, constrained not by talent or ambition but by infrastructure readiness, regulatory alignment, and the need for systemic liquidity. And, he argued, Indonesia can compress India’s multi-year evolution into five to seven years if the country moves decisively.

From 1,000 Trades a Second to 50,000

To understand what is coming, Misra says, Indonesia must think in terms of latency and scale, not just policies and slogans.

Twenty-five years ago, when his team was asked to build a real-time risk engine for India’s National Stock Exchange, the performance brief was already demanding.

“We were told to budget for a thousand trades a second,” he recalled. “We had to stop one trade before the next one could happen. We were given ten milliseconds per decision. And that was 25 years ago.”

Today, he said, Indian spot markets handle around 50,000 trades per second, while derivatives trading routinely reaches multiples of that figure. For risk systems, surveillance tools and margin controls, that changes everything. Exposure has to be recalculated after every trade, at the same speed the market is firing orders.

This is where he sees Indonesia needing to “build for the future, not for yesterday.”

Indonesian exchange’s own plans go in that direction. Broto Endianto, Head of IT Development at the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX), told the forum that the bourse aims to refresh its entire trading engine and supporting infrastructure by the end of 2026, using newer technology and AI-driven surveillance.

Broto said IDX already deploys next-generation firewalls and machine-learning-based monitoring to detect abnormal trading patterns. But he was blunt that the exchange “cannot work alone,” because the attack surface lies across a network of 93 broker members, clearing and settlement institutions and custodian banks.

Indonesia’s Problems Look Familiar to India

Misra’s optimism is grounded in something counter-intuitive: the similarity of Indonesia’s pain points to India’s past crises.

On stage, Lily Widjaja, Executive Director of the Association of Securities Companies, walked the audience through three recent case clusters.

In the first case cluster, a fraudster opens accounts at multiple brokers, buys illiquid shares at one rupiah, then arranges matched trades to sell at 20,000. Because the trades clear “properly” through the exchange and the clearing house KPEI (the Indonesia Clearing and Guarantee Corporation), the fraudster receives real cash, then fails to pay on the buy side.

Second, account takeovers, where criminals gain access to clients’ online trading accounts via phishing or malware, sell their blue-chip holdings, then churn illiquid names to drive prices up before withdrawing funds.

Third, API compromises between brokers and RDN banks. Transfer instructions are altered mid-stream so that client funds are redirected to fraudsters’ accounts and quickly converted into crypto.

An RDN is a segregated investor fund account at a bank, used to hold cash used for trading. In these cases, Lily said, the brokers often never sent the rogue instructions at all.

Misra noted that none of these scams required breaching the “core” systems of IDX or the Financial Services Authority (OJK). The patterns were painfully similar to India’s own Harshad Mehta era, when a legendary stock operator exploited loopholes in rules and back-office processes rather than hacking computers.

“It is not that the software is always the weak point,” he said. “These episodes are done without any weakness in the core infrastructure. They exploit loopholes in regulation, in member systems, and in investor behaviour.”

Five to Seven Years: Why He Thinks Indonesia Can Catch Up

If Indonesia today looks like India 15 years ago, what does that imply?

First, Misra believes the building blocks are in place. OJK has launched a 2023–2027 Capital Market Roadmap, with targets including 1,100 listed companies by 2027. IDX is mid-way through an infrastructure upgrade. And the new administration in Jakarta has signalled that its 8% GDP growth ambition cannot be achieved without deeper capital markets.

Second, Indonesia has the same combination of demographics and digital readiness that powered India’s shift: a young, tech-savvy population, rising retail participation, and a government that increasingly sees capital markets as a strategic pillar, not an afterthought.

Third, there is an emerging consensus that the market must move from speculative bursts to systemic depth.

Ranju Parambi, Managing Director for investment banking at UBS, told the forum that Indonesia will never reach 8% growth by focusing only on state-owned enterprises and conglomerates.

“We need a strong entrepreneurial class,” he said. “Those are the people who will create jobs and take risks. But entrepreneurs cannot grow without risk capital. Banks are conservative by definition. In every country, entrepreneurs grow through access to equity markets.”

In his view, the pipeline of IPO candidates in Indonesia has shrunk not because entrepreneurs have disappeared, but because the capital market as a business “is not giving them confidence.”

The Liquidity and AUM Gap

While Misra outlined the structural similarities between India and Indonesia, Kartika Sutandi, Chief Marketing Officer at Jarvis Asset Management, pointed to the most immediate obstacle: liquidity.

Indonesia’s weight in the MSCI global indices—benchmarks followed by the world’s largest funds—has fallen from around 4% in 2010 to roughly 1.3% today. Once a country’s representation drops too low, major global managers no longer allocate teams to cover it.

“When you are small in MSCI, active managers stop paying attention,” she said. “Passive funds will stay, but they only care about liquidity.”

Her point strengthened Misra’s argument. Foreign investors follow domestic liquidity, and domestic liquidity will deepen only when retail investors consistently make money, feel protected, and see a path to build wealth through capital markets.ors follow domestic liquidity, and domestic liquidity will not exist if retail investors consistently lose money.

Technology as Vessel, Not Driver

Misra is cautious about over-selling technology, even though he represents the tech industry.

“Technology does not start everything,” he said. “It enables. Regulation defines what is safe. Technology enforces safety at the speed of the market. People operate both.”

He insists on a three-layer approach. First, regulatory frameworks that tighten margin rules, define exposure limits, and clarify when suspicious transactions can be frozen in the “golden time” before cash leaves the system.

Second, infrastructure and algorithms that can enforce those rules at volumes similar to India’s—tens of thousands of trades per second, with millisecond-scale risk checks.

Third, investor education, using technology to push financial literacy and cyber-hygiene into “the furthest corners” of Indonesia.

On the last point, Lily highlighted new joint circulars by the self-regulatory organizations (SROs) requiring RDN banks and brokers to strengthen cybersecurity by 16 December, as well as guidelines from BSSN (Badan Siber dan Sandi Negara), that provide a more affordable path than jumping straight to international ISO standards.

“We Need a Conductor”

As the forum closed, moderator Sachin Gopalan, a director of Investortrust, said Indonesia’s market players now resemble a talented orchestra without a single conductor.

He argued that the political will is visible, from the ministerial level down. OJK has a roadmap. IDX has a technology plan. Industry associations have real case studies and concrete proposals. A technology provider who helped build India’s capital-market backbone is telling Indonesia it can catch up faster than anyone thinks.

"What is missing is coordination and rhythm," Gopalan said.

Misra’s core message is that Indonesia does not need to invent a new playbook. It needs to compress the Indian playbook into a shorter time frame, adapt it to local conditions, and execute.

“Indonesia is at the stage where, if we mobilize more interest in the capital markets, everything else will follow,” he said. “The similarities with India are striking. The question is not whether Indonesia can get there. It is whether we will move together, fast enough.”

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