Dear TJ Investors,
We would like to take this post as an opportunity to introduce Finvasia and our products to all of you.
Over last six years, we have tried to evolve and adapt to the peculiarities of Indian markets while at the same time, we have tried to slowly tread towards our goal of creating a friction free wholesome financial services company that caters to all financial needs of Indian investors and savers alike.
Beginning 15th August 2016, we started India’s First and Only Zero Brokerage investment plan for all segments and all exchanges. We are very happy with the response we have gotten so far – Thank You for your trust in us. While we have received a lot of praises, we’ve also had clients asking for clarification around our move to abolish brokerage charges. We’ll use this post and the thread to answer the questions we have been asked till date & the questions that you might have henceforth.
Why Zero Brokerage?
Our idea behind zero brokerage is very simple but not new. We use Email, Facebook and/or Whatsapp. We Do Not Pay anything to exchange emails, or get our messages delivered. Essentially, all it takes for Whatsapp or Facebook to deliver our messages is “Data-Packet” (in plain English: internet connection bandwidth). This is exactly how trading works, when you buy or sell a stock or future or any other financial instrument all you consume is a data-packet between broker’s server and exchange server. If you don’t pay to use Whatsapp, Facebook or Gmail why should you pay to trade, when essentially all this is Internet enabled services dependent on servers exchanging information amongst themselves. For a more detailed explanation visit http://finvasia.com/pricing
Zero Clearing Charges – How?
Clearing cost is one of the biggest cost embraced by brokers, where majority of brokers in India have to go through a clearing member who charges them a small clearing fees per trade or per volume trades. So in order make clearing cost Zero, Finvasia became a clearing member of NSE and made the clearing charges too – Zero.
Other charges and/or Hidden Charges?
We have gone leaps and bounds to ensure that there is NO cost to the trader. We DO NOT charge any Other Charges or any Clearing Charges. All you have to pay is government charges as detailed on our website
Kindly visit our brokerage calculator at http://finvasia.com/calculators
For Government charges visit: http://finvasia.com/govt-charges
Leverage - Intraday and Overnight?
Leverage is important for investors. Our investors can avail up to 500% leverage for intraday. The default leverage for all accounts is set to 200% for MIS and 100% for overnight. Please bear in mind that when you avail leverage, we have to keep the margin with the exchange and hence there is a cost to us for giving this facility to our investors. BUT to keep the cost of an average investor Zero we decided to give up to 200% leverage Free of cost to our investors.
Software charge - If yes, how much?
It depends upon which software you use. NOW, a software offered by NSE is FREE to use. We opine that majority of investors can achieve buying and selling with NOW. However, other softwares that we offer ranging from NEST to HFT-Blitz (for high frequency traders) come with a cost. Charge list available here: http://finvasia.com/platforms
Zero Brokerage – Is This a Price War?
This is NOT a price war. There are two main reasons why:
1. Firstly, the world is moving towards a frictionless economy. Technology has allowed buyers and sellers come together to buy and sell directly from each other and as a result create value for each other. Companies like Amazon and Flipkart are an example how disinter-mediating the middle man can make things much cheaper to an average buyer. Finvasia is driven by technology and we have built our business around technology thus we don’t have any overhead costs and we would like to pass on the benefits of these technology to our investors. Hence making brokerage Zero is NOT a price war but an eventuality that the world is moving towards.
2. Secondly and more importantly: We believe that brokerage started as an ancillary service by investment banks but over the decades it transpired into a complete industry in itself. We made brokerage charge Zero because we believe that there can be significant inherent conflict of interest due to the nature of this business. For example, a broker earns more money if his clients generate more volumes; a part of this commission is passed on to the dealers and relationship managers who deal with these clients. These so called “RM’s” now have an inherent interest in either opening new accounts at a growing speed or making their clients trade more and more. It is a very well established theoretical fact that the more an average investor trades, the more are his chances of losing money. So in essence there can be a serious conflict of interest between these sales people and the clients of these brokerage houses. We DON’T pay our sales team based on how much you trade, their incentives are based on client satisfaction rather than client volumes. We want Finvasia to have Zero conflict of interest with its clients at any level hence we made Brokerage Zero.
How does Finvasia earn?
As mentioned above, we believe brokerage is an ancillary service and not a main industry hence our business model is not dependent on brokerage. We will still make money even if we don’t charge our clients. We have many revenue sources apart from brokerage that keeps us going
1) Exchanges pay every broker a volume incentive if the volume of the broker goes over certain benchmarks.
2) We will be launching a suite of products over next 2 years. A lot of these products would be free however there will be some advance products that will attract certain fees, which is another source of revenue for us.
5 minute account opening process – Is it “Legally” approved?
This process is approved by NSE, BSE, MCX, SEBI and other related agencies and going forward you will see a lot of brokers and financial institution making this process central to their account opening process as well.
Here’s how it works – If you have an active account with another broker and a valid Aadhaar Number, you can open an account with us in 5 minutes. We fetch your information from central KRA using your PAN number and complete for KYC in less than 30 seconds. Once we have validated your KYC electronically, we validate your Aadhaar number by sending an OTP to your registered mobile. Once the OTP is validated, we fetch your signatures from Aadhaar and open your account.
ScalperT - When are we launching it?
Before we discuss the launch date, let us throw some light on what ScalperT is?
ScalperT is much more than a trading platform. It’s an ecosystem, a vision and a complete suite of things. ScalperT has started its launch with Zero Brokerage and we plan on launching more modules of it soon.
We anticipate that ScalperT’s trading application will launch before the end of this fiscal year (or hopefully sooner than that).
We are thankful to our investors for their patience while we work towards getting the required regulatory approvals for ScalperT Trading Application. We hope to be able to start giving out its beta version soon. If you would like to get a sneak peek into ScalperT please register your interest here: http://finvasia.com/scalpert
ScalPerT – Other Modules in pipeline
Here’s a sneak peek into our upcoming product line-up
Robo Advisory
This automated, algorithm-based portfolio management advice will allow retail investors to compare their portfolios and benchmark their performance against the Finvasia community, the markets, and their peers. Hence, we are looking to bring the trading or investment pattern of individuals to understand their historical performance and let system given an independent opinion. This will advise the future or rebalance the existing portfolio by keeping the balance in emotional and investment quotient and assist in reinventing our own wheel.
Open Source Web trader
We plan on launching an open source web trader that traders can manipulate using API’s to build platforms that can be completely customized by a trader to fit his specific needs. This web trader will have widgets and apps, just like the ones you have on your android phone, so a user can customize his trading to his needs and not be constrained to the “One Size Fit All” type of trading terminals.
Artificial Intelligence based Trading
We trade and invest everyday with possible assumption to be the best either based on our knowledge or resources available. Over a period, Greed or fear takes a tool and our performance becomes more volatile than market.
Disclosing products even before even launching it – What if someone else launches a similar product before we do?
We believe that there is a dearth of good FinTech products in the market and the market size is significantly large to make any impact if there are more than two companies offering similar products. It is important for us to get feedback from our end-users while we work towards building these products so that we are as close to their expectations and requirements as possible.
In the end, we all must realize that this IS NOT a RACE to come first. There is practically no benefit to launch a product First, in the long run what matters is the product and not its launch date :) . We will be happy to learn from our competitors if they happen to have launched a product before we do.
In the end, we would like to thank you all for the overwhelming response and we look forward to more feedback and more suggestions from you.
We will try to keep this thread active by replying you back as quickly as possible. Please feel free to reach out to us at www.finvasia.com or in this thread if you have any inputs or questions
Happy Trading
Team Finvasia