Angel Broking, the Stock Advisors with Celestial Hunches
When Angel Broking recommends you buy somebody’s stock you bet big on that somebody’s stock. Older than SEBI itself and started in 1987 with just three people, Angel Broking was founded by Dinesh Thakkar, a new sub-broker then. Disappointment followed on the heels of poor quality service trickling down to him from his own broker. “I had entered the market as an investor. I had lost my initial capital due to poor advisory and equally pathetic execution services by brokers,” said a nostalgic Thakkar. Fortunately, the entrepreneur in him spotted a business opportunity at the heart of misfortune. His mission became to establish a broking and advisory service accessible to even individual investors.
Technologically empowered
Angel Broking has constantly innovated and reinvented itself to be the best investment advisory available to retail consumers; erstwhile only accessible to high net worth or super rich investors.
Vinay Agrawal, who took over as CEO from Thakkar in 2015, contemplates, “There is a famous saying, ‘If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will.’ We are a 30-year young startup. Our tech DNA has helped us gain a competitive edge and industry players took some time to catch up; in fact in some areas we are still ahead,” said Agrawal.
Their investments in digital transformation have paid off big time. Today, more than 75 per cent of revenue comes through online platforms of which 60 per cent comes from the mobile app alone. In the last two years, investing activity through their mobile app increased 20 fold and turnover increased 10 fold. In the last fiscal, Angel Broking customers made profits exceeding 1700 crores.
Of riding turbulent macroeconomic winds Thakkar recalls, “We challenged every aspect of the model - if we could reduce transaction cost, promptly confirm deals with our clients, and increase transparency of transactions, we could own a considerable competitive advantage by being the first to cut our prices.
We began by brainstorming how we could achieve this objective and finally concluded that technology was the means through which we could reduce costs and achieve our objective of better pricing.”
Since then, Angel Broking has been a pioneer investor of cutting edge technology. “We spent hours designing processes and revising work flows to weed out redundancy. We worked out the cost per transaction based on our increased capacity,” added Thakkar.
The approach worked. Within the last two years, Angel Broking garnered many valuable technological firsts. Agrawal continued, “Till July 2015, no one in the broking industry ever thought that account opening, activation and a customer striking his first trade, can be done in less than two-three days but we do it in less than an hour. Similarly, when we deployed chatbots to resolve customer queries through Facebook and Twitter, we redefined query resolution making it the fastest, most convenient and customer friendly.”
The midcap strategy by Angel Broking’s ARQ, an in-house smart investment engine, has given more than 42 per cent returns in just 12 months.
Angel Broking has come a long way. They were just one office and 100 clients in the early days; today they are a leading stock broking and wealth management firm of international recognition spread across the nation with close to 100 branches and the largest business partner network of over 9000 sub brokers and business partners (the closest competitor has just over 4000). It’s a network powered by sophisticated technology to provide the best-in-class service to their clients.
