2023 was an eventful year for companies and brands. Most focused on innovating and implementing new technology in daily processes. Nithin Kamath, co-founder and CEO at Zerodha said that their major focus too was on backed and b behind the scenes changes, be it technology, operations, compliance, or customer support. Zerodha dedicated 2023 to streamlining, overhauling and refactoring the behind-the-scenes systems, and R&D, paving the way for several new products and features that they have in the pipeline, said Kamath in his company blog.
Kamath further stated that the company’s focus has evolved since its inception in 2010 “when it was all about reducing trading costs and bringing transparency to broking. Today, it is about helping the customer do better with their money and manage their wealth holistically; not just in terms of money,” he said.
Subsequently, sister initiatives of Zerodha have been running in parallel to achieve this.
Rainmatter Fintech – supports startups helping Indians do better with money.
Rainmatter Health – supports startups helping Indians make healthier choices. “No amount of money can make up for bad health,” added Kamath.
Rainmatter Climate/Foundation – supports startups and social sector working on causes that can help our society and the planet, do better. “What is the point of success and prosperity if there isn’t a healthy planet or society as we know it?”
Education, storytelling and outreach – “To do well financially, we must do it inclusively as a country,” Kamath opined. This can happen only through education, knowledge-sharing, and the creation of more entrepreneurs in our country. Almost everything Zerodha does on social media or podcasts is an attempt to share knowledge that might be helpful to others.
In his blog, Kamath shared some key updates from the year gone by. Let’s take a look at some of them.
For the trading platform, new universal search on Kite enables discovery and searching of all instruments available for trading and investing including mutual funds, govt. securities, T-Bills, state development loans, and IPOs in one place. Furthermore, supporting offerings such as charts, auctions, bids, portfolio analytics, real-time persistent bulletins, pledging of securities, systematic withdrawal plans (SWP), new fun offers (NFO), national pension system (NPS) investments, real-time earmarking of stocks sold from the demat account to enable credit of 80 percent of the value of sold stocks instantly, an in-house order management system that is now in beta and Sensibull becoming free for all Zerodha customers, among many more have been select updates.
For the back-office, near instant account opening, family accounts, fundamental insights, faster contract notes, online account opening for minors, a new re-KYC flow, additional payment gateway, a new semantic search system, among many more have been key highlights.
“Over many months, we migrated 100s of billions of portfolio records to an entirely new high-performance database backend. Migration for all similar databases continues. We also migrated all systems and applications including legacy ones to a modern, robust, runtime environment,” mentioned Kamath.
“Zerodha also deployed significantly improved infrastructure-wide logging, monitoring, and auditing systems and significant upgrades to security features across infrastructure and an overhaul of data crunching processes, bringing the generation of reports from hours to minutes, for instance, PDF contract notes,” he added
Additionally, “A new in-house distributed, fault-tolerant messaging backend to enable scale message delivery to customers (e-mails, SMS, notifications), a new in-house system that synchronizes realtime streams (orders, positions etc) from the Order Management System across multiple data centres with low latency and significantly improved fault tolerance. This makes the integration of our 4th data centre location seamless,” Kamath said.
In 2014, Zerodha launched Varsity, an educational initiative. In 2023, they launched Zero1, a YouTube channel that imparts lessons in a fun manner. The channel is being built in collaboration with LearnApp. The financial services company also launched Varsity Junior on YouTube to teach basic concepts of financial literacy to children.
Zerodha also launched the Zerodha Fund House AMC (asset management company), a joint venture with smallcase in October last year. They launched two funds – Zerodha Nifty LargeMidcap 250 Index fund, and Zerodha ELSS Nifty LargeMidcap 250 Index fund. Within the first two months, these funds have a combined AUM of Rs 200 crores.