BENGALURU: Walmart-backed digital payments platform PhonePe will take on incumbent players like Zerodha and Groww with its new stock broking platform Share. Market under its subsidiary PhonePe Wealth Broking.
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Though it didn’t set target in terms of onboarding users, it will introduce new features in the coming months. The platform went live on Wednesday with stocks, ETFs and WealthBaskets, and other segments will be rolled out soon.
Since there are already many platforms, the firm wants to differentiate and hopes to find the right match. Sundararaman Ramamurthy, MD and CEO of BSE, who was present at the launch, said from 2008 to 2020, the increase in individual investors or unique client codes was just 18%, but from 2020 to 2023, it was 176%. He added that BSE had around 5 crore unique client codes till 2020 and today it is 14 crore. “This 9 crore increase happened in the recent past aided by the KYC registration process being simplified and digitalised.”
Ujjwal Jain, CEO of Share.Market, said under WealthBaskets, they will launch more curated collections of stocks and investment products. He said there is vibrant growth in the active trading community that trades with different objectives. “Our goal is to offer benefits of discount broking and we will continue to invest in advanced technology, data and research,” he said. Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe, believes capital markets have the potential to make real money at scale. “We wanted to be a partner to the Indian consumer and small businesses in their journey to financial inclusion,” he said.
While they are offering MF, ETF under the wealth category, PhonePe is already into merchant lending, and it wants to enter the consumer lending business soon. “We are into health insurance and we have not really forayed into life. In each of these sectors – insurance, lending and wealth- individually we are trying to come up with our own 10-year strategy,” he said.
