Sebi on Thursday barred stock brokers from directly accepting cash from their clients as it looks to promote digital payments.

Besides, stock brokers are not permitted to receive cash deposits in their bank accounts from clients.

India has invited US President Donald Trump to be the chief guest for next year's Republic Day parade, the Times of India reported on Friday.

An official response from the US is still awaited.

The rupee on Thursday surged by 20 paise to end at a one-week high of 68.57 against the US dollar buoyed by a steep fall in crude prices and a strong rally in equity markets.

Forex market witnessed a revival in sentiment after crude prices plunged the most in two years on supply glut worries after Libya said its four oil export terminals were reopening, ending a standoff that had closed most of its oil output.

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has moved higher by 1.3% at Rs 1,292 on the BSE after the company said its water & effluent treatment business won orders valued Rs 23.88 billion.

The orders have been secured from the Madhya Pradesh Jal Nigam Maryadit for the execution of Satna, Kundatiya and Mohanpura multi village rural water supply schemes on turnkey basis. The projects are funded by the New Development Bank, L&T said in a press release.

Shares of airlines and oil marketing companies (OMCs) companies were trading higher by up to 5% on the BSE after the Brent Crude recorded its biggest one-day fall in two years on Wednesday.

All three listed OMCs, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL), Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) and Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) were up 3% to 5%.

RIL hits $100 billion again: Billionaire Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries hit $100 billion mark in market capitalization, even as the shares surged to all-time high levels on Thursday. Reliance Industries shares zoomed to an intra-day high of Rs 1,091.5, up by nearly 5%, intra-day taking its market capitalization to 6.87 lakh crore, or $100 billion, converted at the current USD/INR rate of 67.82.

Tata Motors’ Sanand facility, which was set up to produce the Nano, is on the verge of discontinuing mass production of the small car. The company will now produce Nano cars on request only. “We will execute production order only when we receive a request from the company’s dealership. Either we will give it from our stock or we will have it produced and supplied,” said SN Barman, vice-president (sales, marketing and customer care), passenger vehicle unit, Tata Motors.

Reliance Jio aims to reimagine India with artificial intelligence (AI), Shailesh Kumar, chief data scientist of Jio, said, adding the telco would deploy AI to solve real-time problems in India. Jio believes that mobile network and data can be provided at low costs by deploying scalable AI, lowering tariffs. The timeline for the technology to be rolled out is yet to be announced. Speaking at the Nasscom Democratizing AI summit, Kumar said Jio continues to expand its telecom infrastructure to remotest areas in the country as the first step.

The Telecom Commission, the highest policymaking body in the department of telecommunications (DoT), on Wednesday approved the recommendations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) with regard to net neutrality. With this, telecom operators who were constrained due to the regulator’s differential pricing regulation will get some leeway in pricing their value-added services in three areas — specialised services, content delivery networks and traffic management.

NTPC, currently high on solar energy plans, has shelved the plan to sell its Kayamkulam facility (Rajiv Gandhi Combined Cycle Power Station – RGCCPS) to the Kerala government. It was the Union power ministry that had first mooted sale of RGCCPS-Kayamkulam to the Kerala government. In fact, Union power minister Piyush Goyal and Kerala power minister MM Mani had even arrived at an in-principle understanding on the sale before price became a contentious issue.

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