Leading financial services company Zerodha has had a fruitful year if the 60% year-on-year rise in profits and revenue are any indication. The twelve-year-old company, which is popular for its suite of products offering retail brokerage, currencies and commodities trading, mutual funds, and bonds, clocked nearly ₹1800 crores in profit and ₹4300 crores in revenue for 2021-22. The startup, by the way, has not raised any external capital so far and is owned by the poster boy founder brother, Nithin and Nikhil Kamath.
Latest numbers, announced by Nithin Kamath, are an impressive improvement from the ₹2729 crores the company had raked in in overall revenue in FY21. The rise in profits is noticeable as well – from ₹1122 crores in FY21 to nearly ₹1800 crores in FY22. The same numbers in FY20 were ₹938.5 crores (revenue) and ₹424 crores (profit).
Today, Zerodha is one of the leading online brokerages operating in the country, claiming that it contributes over 15% of all retail trading volumes in India. Through its robust and impressively design technology suite of retail apps, customers place millions of orders (10-12 million orders daily) via its ecosystem of investment platforms.
The National Stock Exchange (NSE), which is the leading stock exchange in the nation and the largest derivatives exchange in the world, puts Zerodha’s active client base at around 6.2 million, as of March 31.
According to Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath, the last two years were an “outlier” for trading companies, and trading volumes rose in the same period. In 2021, there was a surge in the influx of new users, a host of IPOs, and the presence of volatility in the market, all of which helped the company witness a rise in the number of its daily average users.
This begs the question, what is next for Zerodha after a fruitful year? It seems that the company wants to move away from its dependence on legacy systems and develop its own in-house order management system (OMS). An OMS is a computer software that manages the lifecycle of an order and keeps track of all the information and processes, ranging from order entry to processing and after-sales services.
Expect Zerodha’s in-house OMS to roll out during the start of 2023, which will let the company have full control over its product. Additionally, it will be working on its Nudge feature, which aids traders in maintaining a record through the platform, tagging their trades, and keeping a track of their investing goals.
