In 2023, Zerodha, a prominent brokerage firm, shifted its focus towards backend and operational enhancements, including technology, compliance, and customer support, according to the founder, Nithin Kamath. The 13th year marked a dedicated effort to streamline and revamp behind-the-scenes systems and research and development (R&D), setting the stage for upcoming products and features.
Zerodha’s initial mission of reducing trading costs and introducing transparency to broking has naturally evolved. Presently, the company aims to assist customers in optimizing their finances and managing wealth comprehensively.
The focus extends beyond monetary aspects, incorporating holistic management of customers’ wealth and money through integrations with partners in areas like health and climate.
Key updates from Zerodha in the previous year include:
### Trading Platform Enhancements:
1. **Universal Search on Kite:**
– Facilitates discovery and searching of all tradable instruments, including mutual funds, government securities, T-Bills, state development loans, and IPOs in one place.
2. **Charts:**
– Updated versions of ChartIQ and TradingView with additional indicators, drawing tools, chart types, and keyboard shortcuts.
– Entire backend for charts rewritten, migrating billions of chart data points to a more performant, distributed database.
3. **Auctions:**
– Allows placing orders in the auction market on Kite, opening daily at 2 PM, where sellers offer short-delivered shares typically at a premium.
4. **Bids:**
– Introduction of a unified bids orderbook on Kite for bidding on Govt. Securities, T-Bills, and SDL.
5. **Virtual Contract Note:**
– Real-time estimated breakdown of brokerage, charges, and taxes for the day, offering order-wise charge details before placing an order.
### Backoffice Improvements:
1. **Near-Instant Account Opening:**
– Complete revamp of account opening systems for near-instant online account opening.
2. **Family Accounts:**
– Addition of family members with Zerodha demat accounts to Console for viewing consolidated holdings and analytics.
3. **Verified P&L:**
– Allows users to publicly share their P&L report, ensuring authenticity.
4. **Fundamental Insights:**
– Console now offers fundamental insights for stocks in the portfolio, including historical performance, revenue sources, patterns, and peer comparisons.
### R&D Developments:
The year 2023 focused on invisible tweaks and rewrites of backend systems and infrastructure. Significant migrations of portfolio records to a high-performance database backend were carried out, along with modernizing runtime environments and deploying improved logging, monitoring, and auditing systems.
### Future Plans:
Zerodha aims to continue its evolution, focusing on aiding customers in making informed decisions while trading. Upcoming product updates include:
1. **Realtime Nudges:**
– Set alerts, trigger orders, or enable Kill Switch based on rules on live P&L.
2. **Nudge Assist:**
– Analyze trades and provide actionable insights when deviations from set trading rules occur.
3. **Alert Triggers Basket:**
– Execute a basket of orders when an alert triggers.
4. **Trade from Option Chain:**
– Introducing a new order execution experience for active traders based on Open Interest (OI).
These developments showcase Zerodha’s commitment to continuous improvement and innovation in the brokerage industry, aligning with its evolved mission of holistic wealth management for customers.
