Much earlier, the Equity markets were regulated by SEBI and Commodity markets by Forwards Market Commission (FMC). By design, every broker had to obtain membership separately and operate it as 2 different business units.
FMC was then merged with SEBI and SEBI laid down guidelines for unification of the Equity and Commodity businesses. This change is a big because we’ve to merge two different companies, processes have to undergo changes, system related changes and since there’s dependency on RMS vendor, it’s taking an extended period of time.