Brokerage firm Zerodha Founder and CEO Nithin Kamath, during the first day of Isha Leadership Academy's business leadership programme - 'Isha Insight: The DNA of Success', said a business should speak for itself, and that India needs more "conscious" businesses. "You can be a business that lets the product do the talking, that thinks about giving back. A conscious business. I think India needs that. India needs a lot of big businesses which are conscious about 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. "I don't see how things will change. I think wherever there is the concentration of wealth, people should do more to give back," he said.
Speaking about his journey with Zerodha, Kamath said he thinks he's an accidental businessman. "I have no business in my blood. And thankfully, by not having any external investor, we have never been nudged to do something very different to the way we think of the world," he added.
Talking about the broking industry, Kamath said, "We always knew there was an opportunity to disrupt the existing broking or income venture. The way the businesses were set, the incentives were not aligned with the customer."
He said he and his brother Nikhil Kamath realised early on that there's an opportunity to go into the industry and clean up. "There is a way to disrupt, just operationally, even if it's not a product. There are things that can be done that are right for the customer," he said.
Calling themselves "custodians of the customer", Kamath emphasised the importance of transparent culture. "In financial services, intermediaries make their buck by making things complex and opaque. The first thing we wanted to do was to make it transparent," he said.
He said at Zerodha, the company's culture is to do what is best for the customer. "If you can make a customer's life easier, you should go ahead and do it. Transparency is the foundation upon which we intend to build our organisation," he said.
Zerodha started operations on the August 15, 2010, 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.
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