New Delhi, July 9 (AHN) Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath on Thursday took a swipe at rival platforms on X after Groww, one of India’s largest retail brokers by active users, began offering regular mutual funds through its subscription service Groww Prime.

In a social media post, Kamath said many platforms that launched direct mutual fund offerings around the time Zerodha introduced its Coin platform have since “disappeared or pivoted to something else.”

Remaining competitors are “rethinking their choice of offering direct plans,” he said, adding that "Zerodha will continue to offer direct mutual funds for free."

His remarks followed Bengaluru-based Groww expanding its product mix to include regular mutual funds on its subscription-based Groww Prime platform. The product, initially launched for a select set of users earlier this year, has now been rolled out to the company's two-crore customer base.

Groww had previously offered only direct mutual funds, claiming them to be a low-cost investment option that can generate better long-term returns by eliminating distributor commissions.

Kamath said that Zerodha's pricing philosophy has remained unchanged since it pioneered the discount brokerage model in 2010.

"When we started the discount brokerage model in India in 2010, we decided to charge the same fee regardless of trade size. The logic was simple: if the effort to execute a trade is the same, why should customers pay differently?" he said.

Kamath added that Zerodha's philosophy remained the same even after the launch of Coin, choosing to offer only direct mutual funds instead of charging commissions through regular plans.

"You can't call yourself a discount or a low-cost broker if you charge a percentage fee on transactions, because there's no incremental effort in executing a larger order," he said.

Kamath also urged investors to check if they are holding regular mutual funds, adding that Zerodha would help customers switch regular funds to direct plans if they opted so.

—AHN

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