During the first day of the business leadership programme 'Isha Insight: The DNA of Success', a broker firm Zerodha Founder and CEO Nithin Kamath said that India needs more conscious businesses and that business should speak for itself. A business that thinks about giving back can be a business that lets the product do the talking. India needs a lot of big businesses that are conscious of what is happening around them, the 41-year-old entrepreneur said.
The CEO of India's largest retail brokerage firm said the concentration of wealth is happening all over the world and that's only going to accelerate. He said that where there is the concentration of wealth, people should do more to give back.
Kamath said he thinks he's an accidental businessman, referring to his journey with Zerodha. I have no business in my blood. He said that despite not having any external investor, we have never been nudged to do something very different to the way we think of the world.
Kamath said that there was an opportunity to disrupt the existing broking or income venture because we always knew there was an opportunity. The incentives for businesses were not aligned with the customer, as was the way the businesses were set. He said that he and his brother Nikhil Kamath realised early that there was an opportunity to go into the industry and clean up. Even if it is not a product, there is a way to disrupt. He said there are things that can be done that are right for the customer.
Kamath called themselves custodians of the customer, emphasising the importance of a transparent culture. Intermedials make their buck by making things complex and opaque. He said the first thing we wanted to do was to make it transparent.
He said at Zerodha, the company's culture is to do what is best for the customer. Transparency is the foundation upon which we intend to build our organisation, he said.
On August 15, 2010, Zerodha started operations to break barriers that traders and investors face in terms of cost, support, and technology. By using disruptive pricing models and in-house technology, Zerodha has become the biggest stockbroker in India in terms of 7.5 million clients, which is about 15 per cent of all Indian retail trading volumes.