'Groww Did Well': What Zerodha Co-Founder Nikhil Kamath Said On Rival

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has a message for those tracking the rivalry between India's two leading stockbroking platforms: "there is room for many more players in the market".

Asked whether Groww overtaking Zerodha in active clients bothered him, Kamath said the Indian stock market was still too small for the competition to be a concern. He was speaking in an exclusive conversation with NDTV CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal at the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi.

"Groww did well," Kamath said, adding that India needed hundreds of companies like Groww and Zerodha to build a stock market of the scale expected of a developed economy.

"I think it's a very small market. I think the penetration of equity investors in India is sub-5 per cent. Groww did well. I think we need hundreds of Growws and hundreds of Zerodhas to create a market which is of that scale that a developed country like India requires," he said.

'We Need More Traders, More Speculators'

Kanwal asked Kamath how competitive he was at work and whether it irked him that Groww, which had venture capital backing, had overtaken Zerodha in active clients. Zerodha, in contrast, was built without venture funding.

Kamath said his brother, Zerodha co-founder Nithin Kamath, might be better placed to answer the question. He then turned to the bigger opportunity in India's financial markets.

"I think if you were to look at the trajectory of economies across the world, a stock market where it is easy to list companies and raise capital, a really large stock market, has been synonymous with developed economies and how well and how quickly they have done well," he said.

For India to build a deeper capital market, more people need to participate, he argued. That means not just long-term investors but also traders and speculators.

"The Indian stock market has to grow and we need more traders, we need more speculators, we need more investors, we need more people to participate and we also need more brokers and intermediaries," Kamath said.

"I think it's a good thing. Need more speculators."