Fisdom Launches Stock Broking Services

Fisdom, one of India’s fastest growing wealth advisory platforms, has now made a foray into stock broking. Fisdom is backed by Naspers. Incidentally, Naspers is a South Africa headquartered technology investor with deep value investments in a number of internet and fintech propositions across the world.

The stock broking venture will position Fisdom as an advisory based stock broker offering a wide array of financial products and services. This would include equity, futures, options, ETFs, Gold Bonds, NCDs as well as services like currency broking. All this would be backed by strong research pool as well as screeners to shortlist companies.

Direct investing or do-it-yourself investing has become the big craze in India, especially after the surge of millennials in stock market trading. This trend has been underlined by a lot of value added digital services being provided by the low cost broking houses like Zerodha, Upstox, 5Paisa and Paytm Money.

Of course, cost would continue to be a major consideration for the do-it-yourself or DIY investor. Fisdom will target the long term investors and the aggressive traders. The idea is to have a dual pricing approach. For the long term investors and the small traders, the focus will be on offering zero brokerage or near zero brokerage offerings to clients. 

For the aggressive traders, who churn large volumes on thin spreads, Fisdom will offer a fixed subscription model. Here the clients will pay a fixed brokerage amount for a month and on that amount they will be allowed to put in almost limitless trades. Only the statutory charges will be billed on actuals. This is likely to attract aggressive churners of capital.

Fisdom already operates a successful mutual fund distribution platform and wants to extend that logic to equities. Apart from low costs, Fisdom will also offer a host of add-ons like research coverage on nearly 3,500 stocks, research tools like quants and technicals as well as smart screeners enabling the right search in a short time.

The broking opportunity looks salivating with the demat account doubling in the last 18 months from 3.5 crore to 7 crore. Of course, the risk is that the broking end is already getting crowded and differentiation and a unique proposition will make the difference in the final analysis. That would be Part-2 of the fight for the broking mindshare.