The Moneymaker Tejas Khoday started trading in his teenage years i.e. pre-2008 and used many platforms over the years.

Tejas Khoday started trading in his teenage years i.e. pre-2008 and used many platforms over the years. At 22, he started his stock market career at a brokerage firm. At that time, the retail brokerage industry was technologically handicapped, which made Tejas dream about starting a tech-focused brokerage to cater to active traders and investors in India. His younger brother Yashas Khoday joined as the CTO and his elder brother Shreyas Khoday advises on the broader strategy and growth at the firm.

Talking about his eureka moment, Tejas says, "Brokers didn't understand technology and technologists didn't understand broking. We understood both and that was our edge!" Fyers developed its own in-house technology rather than relying on conventional solutions offered by third party software vendors.

Mentioning about the niche features, Tejas says, "We took an engineering approach to resolving customers' real needs rather than employing a battery of customer support agents to handle complaints which we would've had to do if we had subscribed to software vendors. This helped us keep our costs low and also gave us more control of the overall customer experience."Another major differentiator is that FYERS is among the only brokerages in India that hasn't indulged in proprietary trading activities. This was overlooked by many until recently.

As a self-funded startup, their aim is to address the needs of the retail investing community. With the loyalty of early clients on the platform and their word-of-mouth referrals, they built a customer base of around 70,000 across all major Indian exchanges including NSE, BSE & MCX mostly without any marketing or advertising efforts.

Getting the license from NSE in August 2015 made them one of the youngest stockbrokers in the country. Reaching the 1000 clients milestone in December, 2016 was another great moment for the team.

Millions of new investors entered the stock markets in 2020 due to the nationwide lockdowns and the ongoing stock market activity during that phase. With this the platform last year witnessed 150% business growth and over 100% jump in new clients as compared to the pre-Covid period.

"Our customer base grew from 30,000 to over 65,000 during the year and over 10 million trades were completed through our platform," claims Tejas. Furthermore, they expanded presence to Tier 2 cities as the trading activity increased from non-metro cities. "We forayed into Andhra Pradesh by setting up an office in Vishakhapatnam and plan to have a physical presence in prominent locations in the years ahead, to increase the permeation of trading services across geographies and to further strengthen our PAN-India presence. We also doubled our headcount during the period," adds Tejas.

There is a structural shift happening in the way people invest their savings as they're gravitating towards new-age investment platforms. On the other hand, the wave of new SEBI regulations makes it extremely difficult for traditional players to continue doing business as usual. In this new era, very few brokerages/ platforms can capitalize. In this scenario Fyers is well positioned as it expands its scope of services beyond traders to encompass all types of retail investors with a wide range of products & services such as Direct mutual funds, digitally assisted wealth management and so on