Mumbai: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has relaxed the mandatory requirement for research analysts and research entities to maintain call recordings of their interactions with institutional investors, in a move to reduce the compliance burden and improve ease of doing business, The Hindu BusinessLine reported.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine — SEBI eases call recording rules for research analysts
Under the revised framework, which comes into effect on November 8, 2026, call recordings of interactions with institutional investor clients will no longer be mandatory. SEBI has revised its Master Circular dated February 6, 2026, which covered the requirement under Regulation 25(1)(vii) of the SEBI (Research Analysts) Regulations, 2014, LiveLaw Business reported.
The broader duty to keep records has not been removed. Analysts must maintain records of interactions with all clients, including prospective clients before onboarding and both fee-paying and non-fee-paying clients, in forms such as signed physical records, emails from registered email IDs, SMS messages, call recordings or any other legally verifiable method, according to SEBI.
Those records must be kept for five years, and where a dispute has been raised they must be preserved until the dispute is resolved, or until SEBI directs otherwise. SEBI also clarified that a call recording is not needed when the interaction takes place through a channel such as email, where a digital footprint is already available, ANI reported.
SEBI said the purpose of keeping client-interaction records is to document the interaction so that any client grievance related to research services can be addressed. The relaxation follows representations from market participants, according to the reports.