BW Businessworld Disrupt interacted with the founding team of Trading Bells, Amit Gupta & Parth Nyati to know more about their business modelWhile still working at Barclays Capital and being passionate about trading, Amit, CEO Co-founder, TradingBells, was closely watching the financial services space in India and the evolving start up scene. He observed, that though the retail investor base in India was growing, the existing brokers lacked effective customer service and leveraging latest technology to scale operations.
At TradingBells, Amit is responsible for setting the long term vision, business strategy and charting the growth trajectory of the company, which has presence in over 80 cities. A strong believer in increasing the retail participation in financial markets, Amit has ensured adoption of latest technology to improve productivity, reduce costs and make financial markets accessible to common people.
Armed with this insight, Amit, on one of his trips to India, bumped into Parth, Co-founder and COO, at a start up event. At that point Parth was working with Swastika, a leading brokerage firm and was developing software and handling their overall customer experience. Sharing a common passion for trading, both got chatting up and remained in touch. Over the course of next few years, they exchanged ideas about how they can address the gaps in the trading market and the idea for TradingBells took seed. Always an entrepreneur at heart, Amit convinced Parth to come on board, who was looking for the next big challenge and both quit their respective cushy jobs in early 2016 to start their entrepreneurial journey. TrandingBells founded in July 2016.
TradingBells is a discount broker offering share, commodity and currency broking at very affordable rates to Indian traders. We offer zero brokerage on delivery based transactions, and lower of Rs. 20 or 0.01% of the turnover per executed order for intraday and F&O transactions. We also offer high leverage (upto 22x on equity and upto 7x on Commodity trading) as well as free trading and demat account opening with zero balance for our customers. TradingBells is founded by a mix of IIT Alumni and Chartered Accountants and our focus is on making the best use of technology which enables trading on the stock markets a joyful and painless process. All our trading and other software are given free of cost to our customers. We believe in transparency and all our charges and margin policies are explained in detail on our website as well as on the account opening forms.
Although there are a few players in the discount broking space in India, we are the first and only discount brokers to offer:1. Market Research and Stock tips though our trading platform to our customers.
2. IPO investments
Additionally, TradingBells is run by a group of highly qualified and experienced Individuals, with in-depth knowledge and understanding of the financial markets and technology, thereby able to continuously improve and offer the best services to its customers through upgraded technology and innovative offers from time to time.
In terms of number of accounts, currently India has close to 25m demat accounts of which only about one-fourth are active. As against this, China has in excess of 200m trading accounts & US has 60m+ trading accounts. Compared to their population, the percentage of trading account holders is much higher in US and China as compared to India. As Ministry of Finance, SEBI and stock exchanges are promoting financial literacy, this number is bound to rise in India.
There are a number of challenges we are facing currently such as:1. Low internet penetration compared to more developed markets
2. Resistance to change from the customers (to switch to online trading)
3. High taxes and levies for the customer, which adds to their trading costs, thereby increasing their break-even point
4. Lengthy and manual process for KYC and account opening
5. Growing competition in terms of discount brokers and price wars
The opportunity to grow in this market is tremendous, because the number of people in India who can invest in the stock markets is around 200m (18-55 years old; with a minimum earning and saving capacity enough to start investing). So potentially the number of demat accounts can grow 8 folds.
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
