At a time when SEBI wants a joint platform to ease woes of investors during trading disruptions, new-age broking companies such as Groww, FYERS, Zerodha and Upstox, are upping the ante on the technology front to provide better customer experience.
In recent times, with increasing dependence on technology in securities market, there is a rise in instances of glitches in trading members’ systems, some of which lead to disruption of trading services and investor complaints. Hence, the onus is on brokers to reinvent themselves as tech companies and shed the lethargy akin to many BFSI peers.
User experience is getting a more centrestage. One of the main things a tech platform needs to do is to simplify the user experience to a large extent, Tejas Khoday, Co-Founder and CEO, FYERS, told businessline. “What we are doing at FYERS is we’re simplifying the user experience to a level that almost anybody can use it.”
Handling technical glitches
Trading being a high financial risk activity, companies need to be invested in ensuring technical glitches do not result in heavy losses for customers. In fact, the regulator too stressed on this sentiment in its recent circular.
Zerodha’s CEO Nithin Kamath, in a recent blogpost, said that the company continues to invest huge amounts of effort into making systems as resilient to technical issues as possible. “The way we have architected our systems is that customer activity is distributed across completely independent ‘silos,’ so that problems do not cascade to the entire client base, he said.
At FYERS, Khoday pointed out that priority focus in 2022 was to keep the platform “fail-safe as much as possible.”
First-mover advantage
Mobile is no longer a trading device option. It is now well on its way to be the defacto interface. According to Gagan Singla, MD, blinkX by JM Financial, the first-mover advantage will belong to the one that creates a stellar user experience. If user interface mattered in the past, it will be the differentiator in the future, he said in a recent report. The focus should be on how brokers are preparing for the big tech transformation. “The first big trend underpinning broking is the shift to Mobile First. If apps offered a mobile experience, the next stage is to create broking platforms with mobile as the default onboarding mode.”
Desktop onboarding is fast becoming a thing of the past for these broking start-ups. “Desktop constitutes a smaller percentage relatively. For us, and all other major brokers, onboarding and the customer interaction is mostly mobile,” pointed out Lalit Keshre, Founder and CEO, Groww. With a thrust on Mobile First, the company plans to roll out Trading View on mobile soon complementing the ChartIQ already available..
In Singla’s words, the future of broking is anticipation. “Data and engagement will be used to anticipate losses, envisage trend shifts and anticipate possible defaults. The future will belong to the brokers best prepared for this shift,” he said.