Hey everyone — and @nithin if you happen to see this, I’d genuinely love your perspective.
I’m Sanketh, a 19 year old engineering student based near Bengaluru. 48 hours ago I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, got curious about the broking world, and somehow ended up doing what I think is the most intense 2 days of research I’ve ever done in my life.
Here’s the problem I keep coming back to:
Zerodha, Groww and Upstox have done something incredible — they made investing accessible to 200 million Indians. But they solved the platform problem. There’s still a human problem nobody has cleanly solved.
Millions of first time retail investors don’t just want an app. They want a person they can trust. Someone who understands their goals, guides their decisions, and is accountable. But finding that person today is still entirely word of mouth — uncle’s recommendation, colleague’s contact, random WhatsApp forward.
There’s no reliable way to:
- Discover SEBI verified independent brokers and RIAs in one place
- Compare them by actual verified performance data
- See genuine client reviews before trusting someone with your money
- Understand fee structures upfront
And on the broker side the problem is just as real. I spent the last 48 hours reaching out to 60+ SEBI registered brokers across India via WhatsApp and email. Here’s what I found:
Three separate firms had already shut down or never started operating at all — which tells me the independent broking model is under more pressure than the registered numbers suggest.
But one active independent broker answered my questions directly and honestly:
- How do you find new clients? — “Only referrals”
- How do you manage client communication? — “WhatsApp and calls”
- What’s the most frustrating part of your practice? — “Compliance. Over regulations.”
When I followed up she added something that really stuck with me — that compliance support would matter more to full member brokers than to sub-brokers like herself. Which means the pain points are completely different depending on where you sit in the broking hierarchy.
So here’s what I think I’m building:
A two sided marketplace — think Practo but for SEBI registered brokers and RIAs. Investors can discover, compare and connect with verified brokers. Brokers get a structured pipeline of quality clients plus tools to manage compliance. The trust layer is built on verified performance data pulled via the Account Aggregator framework — not self reported numbers, not fake reviews.
@nithin — I have a few specific questions I’d love your honest take on if you have a moment:
-
From Zerodha’s scale, do you see retail investors genuinely struggling to find trustworthy human advisers? Or do most people just want to self serve?
-
Is the Account Aggregator framework mature enough today to actually power verified broker performance ratings or is that still years away?
-
Is there a regulatory reason this kind of marketplace hasn’t been built properly in India yet — SEBI liability, RIA framework restrictions, something else?
-
Do you think the independent broker model has a real future in India or is it slowly being squeezed out by zero brokerage platforms?
And for everyone else in this community — I’m still very early and still very wrong about a lot of things. If you’ve built something in this space before and it failed, I genuinely want to know why. If you think this is a terrible idea, tell me that too.
I have my engineering end sems starting in 4 days so I’ll be going quiet for 3 weeks after this. But I’ll be back on 20th June to pick this up properly.
Thanks for reading this far.
Sanketh
