Price war in retail broking; Axis and Angel float discount plans

68671204 68670382 68666967 Mumbai: In a bid to grab the share of rapidly-growing discount-broking market for securities, stock broking firms seem to be the upping their game by offering similar products.On Monday, Axis Direct and Angel Broking came up with discount broking products. Axis Direct’s plan ‘India, Trade@20’, was launched for all Axis Direct customers, who maintain an average quarterly balance of Rs 75,000 with Axis Bank. These customers can now start trading in equity and equity derivatives at a nominal fee of Rs 20 per executed order, the retail-focused broking firm said in a release. Non-Axis Bank customers can also open a trading and demat account online and avail the benefits of ‘India, Trade@20’ at a nominal fee of Rs 250 per month.Arun Thukral, Managing Director and CEO of Axis Securities, said this was a step towards offering the entire bouquet of bank’s products to the customers. “The strategy is a very simple. We are a large bank. We are looking at the entire banks’ products. We are looking at over all relationship,” he said, adding that he believes that eventually offer products such as home loans, mutual funds, insurance and other products to the customers.“Over time, with the Rs 20 guy and the guy who is giving me higher brokerage, we will try and reach and do more customer engagement, whereas the guy with Rs 20 may not require and it may not be viable,” he said.Separately, Angel Broking floated a new online plan, named Angel iTrade plan, which seeks to provide premium services at a simplified pricing, through a flat order-based brokerage fee model. The brokerage plan includes price points of Rs 15 and Rs 30 per order for order sizes up to Rs 50,000 and more than Rs 50,000 respectively in equity, futures and options, commodity and currency segment.The new self-service offering will be available to online consumers from April 1. This plan will offer research, advice, customer support and other value-added services. Discount broking firms emerged as investors’ favourite in 2018 as Zerodha outpaced other big brokerage names in terms of client numbers, data available with the National Stock Exchange showed. Zerodha had 8.47 lakh active clients as of December 2018 end compared with ICICI Securities’ 8.45 lakh customers, HDFC Securities (6.74 lakh), Sharekhan (5.49 lakh), Axis Securities (4.17 lakh) and Angel Broking (4.16 lakh), according to the data.When contacted, ICICI Securities declined to comment on what would be its strategy following the development. Nitin Kamath, CEO of Zerodha, did not answer calls seeking a comment. However, in an interview with ETMarkets.com in February, Kamath had said the discount broking market was not for everyone. “Not everyone can make it into discount broking. Only two players can survive over the long term,” he had said.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2V9lw6L