Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Billionbrains Garage Ventures Limited, or Groww, Q4 FY 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the management's remarks. Please note that this call is being recorded. Additionally, please note that this earnings call is scheduled for a duration of 45 minutes. If you wish to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand feature available on your Zoom dashboard. We will announce your name on the call and unmute your line, post which you can proceed with your questions.
For today's call, from the management, we have Mr. Lalit Keshre, Co-founder and CEO, Mr. Harsh Jain, Co-founder and COO, Mr. Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and CTO, Mr. Ishan Bansal, Co-founder and CFO, Mr. Lalit Bhimani, Group Head, Finance, Mr. Kunalraj Singh Chhabra, Head, Investor Relations. I now hand the call over to Kunal. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Michelle. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the call. Our results and shareholders' letter have been published on the exchanges as well as uploaded on the company's IR website. Before we begin, I would like to remind all the attendees that some statements or comments made on the call today by the management may reflect the outlook or can be deemed as forward-looking, and hence may involve certain risks and are not subject to any review. Such statements or comments are not guarantees of future performance, and the actual results may differ. With that, I would like to invite Lalit for opening remarks.
Thank you, Kunal. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the earnings call. This is our third call after we became public and end of 39 quarters since we started. As you know, overall in India, there are maybe 70 million-80 million, maybe give or take, around these many unique investors in stocks and MF. If you look at the active internet population who are transacting online and so on is in the order of 500 million-600 million, and that is also growing. Why we are telling you is because it feels like we can continue kind of working for hundreds of more quarters and continue building. Also that in every quarter you will probably hear us say the same thing and it might become repetitive what our purpose is and how we want to build well for our customers in the country.
Since this is the fourth quarter, we also thought that it would be good to give you quick highlights of the last financial year and then how we look forward from here. Quickly, first thing, as you know, last year was a very important year for us as we became a public company. We also saw a lot of regulatory changes in our broking business, like True to Label, FNO and so on. I think our company did well there. We launched new products, namely commodities and bonds. On bonds, we had launched primary and now we are launching secondary. Both the products have done well. We've scaled some of the existing products. MTF scaled really well for us. In other products, be it equity, MF, FNO, we grew our market share.
We forayed into wealth management with the Fisdom acquisition, and this helped us introduce three more products on the platform, which is Fisdom, which is the bank partnership product, W, which is wealth management for affluent and HNI customers on Groww, and Prime, which is more for mass affluent customers on Groww. On AMC, we partnered with SSG, of course, which is subject to regulatory approvals. Our AUM grew like 2.5x in one year. Yeah, of course, we became public, so that was another milestone. Going forward, I think, quick summary, our focus will continue to be on scaling our wealth. We feel that now it's been six months of the Fisdom acquisition, and now we have got a lot of kind of learnings in how to look at solving this problem of scaling and so on. We'll continue scaling wealth.
Second is we'll continue compounding our existing businesses, grow market share, which we have been continuously doing. Thirdly, I think that we will see the inflection point how AI will start impacting a lot. We look at it in two ways. One is how we can improve the customer experience leveraging AI, and second is on the productivity side, where our internal teams are shipping much faster, shipping better, and so on. Lastly, as we keep doing, we continue finding new gaps, new products to launch, finding smaller S-curves. We'll continue doing that. Yeah, that's all. I look forward to the questions today. Thank you.
Thank you, Lalit. We will now begin with Q&A. Michelle, please go ahead.
Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask questions may click on the Raise Hand icon. Before asking the question to the management, please introduce yourself, providing your name and your organization name. Please limit yourself to a maximum of two questions so we can accommodate as many participants as possible. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the questions queue up, attendees. You may please click on the Raise Hand icon to ask questions at this time. The first question is from Supratim Dutta. Please unmute yourself and proceed with the question.
Thanks a lot for the opportunity. My first question is on overall broking business. In the DRHP, you had given data around how customer assets grew over a period of time. Typically, people who started somewhere around 2022, 2023 saw their assets grow by 3x-4x over a 3-4-year period. Cohorts which started maybe in 2024 or 2023, how are those tracking given the kind of market correction that we have seen? What is the difference in behavior you are seeing in these cohorts which would have started in the last one or two years versus the ones which started before? Because they would have seen a sharper correction in the last 12 months. If you could give us some color on that, how are you seeing customer behavior vary across different cohorts, that would be very helpful. Secondly, coming to your wealth management business.
Thanks a lot, Lalit, for giving us some color around those businesses. Wanted to understand now that Groww has been launched since January. What is the kind of feedback that you are getting from the product? How do you see that scale up maybe over a 2-3-year period? From the perspective of investments, how do you see investments on the wealth side also play out over the next 2 years? That's my second question. Lastly, a few data keeping questions. One is, you should give the affluent customer asset breakup and contribution to revenue as well. So if you could give that would be very helpful. How much of assets today is from affluent clients on the platform, and what is their revenue contribution? Thank you.
Let me take the first question on the broking side. I think we earlier also talked about that in last one and a half years, the acquisition funnel has been slightly different. Primarily like we have seen that markets are not doing so great since September 2024. Since then, what we have seen that the acquisition funnel has shifted more towards mutual funds and ETFs as the products, and hence the way customers actually getting introduced to the capital market has become slightly different. Their AUM gathering is probably still in line with the similar kind of way that was happening earlier, because SIP is one of the largest mode of AUM accumulation that is happening on MF as well as on ETF also, SIP is very big now. Another thing is there is M2M that keeps on happening across different products.
Even like ETFs, because gold and silver is a large part of it. There is a huge MTM that people saw during February versus January, people were probably significantly positive as well. What we have seen is at aggregate level, most of these customers are still profitable with the, obviously, their 31st March being not a best day for cutoff. If you look at just after that, most of the pain that was there in March or large part of that pain has kind of reversed, and hence people are still making money and hence the inflows are still kind of not going down. On a M2M basis, there is a dip in the AUM.
Thank you for that. [What about] the second question?
Sorry, what was the second question?
Yeah. The second question was on the wealth management business. Given Groww Prime has been launched since January, wanted to understand what is your initial trend or learnings from that, and how do you plan to scale that up over the next two years? What kind of investments would not only Groww Prime but W for Groww as well as Fisdom require over the next two to three years? Because I think in the shareholder letter, you have called out that Fisdom should be profitable by FY 2028. Just wanted to understand that how are you looking at investments across these three platforms as well? Yeah.
Yeah. Supratim, I think it's a bit early. It's been two quarters now since the acquisition and all. I think we are thinking it in a kind of, we are solving it in a very nice way and so on. I think it's very early to comment on anything right now. A lot of things kind of we are building.
Got it. Understood. Just, Lalit, one thing then on the wealth business. Have you seen any cross-sell between the mutual funds, broking and wealth currently, or is it still too early to comment there?
No, of course, there is. As I said, it's early and we are still kind of streamlining the flows and everything. Demand-wise, I think, from the overall potential perspective and demand perspective, there is a large market. I think what we are focusing more on the service levels and raising the bar of the experience and everything.
Understood. On the last, third question on affluent customer assets on the platform and their share of revenue.
Yeah, I think we'll probably get back to you on this. I think it's not on top of our mind.
Sure. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Sanket Godha. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is on your equity options market share. If I look at like-for-like basis, compared to previous quarter and the current quarter, it seems that your market share has increased from 9.1% to 10.6%. What exactly in your view has led to this sharp jump in the market share of 150 basis points? Is it to do with your new product launches like 915 or Groww Cloud and API has played a role? And also, you can give a bit of color, out of the total options trading, what happens in your platform? How much is today contributed by Algo, and how do you see it to play out going ahead? That's my first question. Second, maybe more of on data keeping.
On commodity, you give maybe indirectly the orders and the number of users. If you can give a bit of market share also on ADTO terms, retail ADTO terms, that will be useful to understand how quickly you achieve what kind of market share. Because the number of orders indirectly gives the color, but we don't know how exactly the market share is. Yeah. Those are my two questions.
Sure. Let me take that. On the derivative side, equity derivative side, actually it's not just options, it's a combination of futures and options. The market share that got expanded in this quarter, it is a continuation, if you look at it on a YOY basis or it is happening for us. The reason is, there is a twofold reason. One, the new customers that are coming to the kind of derivatives market, there is some benefits that we are deriving from some of the new initiatives that we are taking, including 915. Large part of this is again, coming on Groww itself.
The second piece is because the last quarter had a lot of volatility, and we saw that our customers who used to kind of trade earlier have also started doing more, and hence the absolute number of customers has significantly increased. Roughly earlier, we had around 14 lakh customers on a quarterly basis transacting. This time we had around 17 lakh customers transacting. Which has actually helped us increase the volume and output was obviously in terms of market share as well. This shows that our retention overall is high on the platform, which helps us recover whenever the customer is interested in any other product. The customer might not be doing derivatives in last quarter, but started doing derivatives in this quarter, might be doing stocks or mutual fund in the last quarter.
That has actually helped us delivering a higher market share on the derivative side. On the Algo side, I think we don't have. It's not meaningful. Any API or Algo today is not really meaningful in terms of any transactions. The third, I think we will start giving commodities-related ADTO because we haven't just crossed even a year of our commodities launch. We thought probably once we cross a year, that is the time probably we'll start delivering the market share number and so that there'll be a YOY comparison, et cetera. We'll be able to review.
Okay. Ishan, any stress or any strategy you have very clearly on Algo-based trading, does it meaningfully contribute to the volume growth and order growth, probably? Means any outlook you have or plans you have with respect to that piece will be useful if you can tell us a couple points there. Second, in the quarter, lastly, sorry. In the quarter, we saw a decent jump in the employee cost and your depreciation. Is it largely related to full employment which led to the increase in the employee cost and this is the new normal going ahead?
Yeah. Let me take the first one. I think as of now, we don't have a very strong strategy on focusing on Algo. We believe the new regulations that are still kind of getting cleaned up over a bit of time will give us more clarity, and we will probably jump into this market once we have full clarity on the regulatory piece. Then only we'll be able to build a product which we can scale. Hence, I think we are trying to wait for that to happen. On the second part, you are right on the depreciation side. There is an impact primarily coming because of the Fisdom acquisition. There is an increase in depreciation that happened.
On employee costs, because we are investing across multiple functions, including asset management and wealth side, and there are initiatives on the AI side also that we are taking in Groww, where we are doing investing. This investment typically comes in the people form for us, and hence the employee cost has increased a little bit from last quarter to this quarter.
If you can give the headcount, if you don't mind.
Today the headcount is around 1,800.
Okay. I get it. That's it from my side.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Manish Ostwal. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question, sir.
Thank you for the opportunity. My question on the wealth management business. What is the differentiating factors, what Groww will bring to the market compared to the existing models? Can you talk about that thing? That will be helpful for us.
Yeah, sure. I'll take that. See, couple of things that are happening is, one is there is a significant change of the customer base from the wealth point of view. The new segment of users who are becoming affluent and HNI, they're coming from a very new age kind of experience. There's an experience layer which is going to be different for the building the wealth business. As Lalit was also saying that we are investing in raising the bar of experience in the service and which is what is going to be a differentiator for us, which comes both from the technology point of view and also on the product selection to an advisory role point of view.
We'll continue building on this, which is what takes us time to get to nail the right solution for people and then keep on scaling that from there.
Secondly, sir. See, last two years we have seen that there's hardly any return to the investor, and now the things are turning around. Two questions. One is the active customer base participation at industry level as well as in your business should increase if the trend sustain in times to come. That is the first thing. Second is in terms of cost to serve and cost to grow, both cost compared to revenue growth, what pace we can assume expenditure growth versus, let's say, 20% revenue growth? What kind of growth we should model in terms of total cost of Groww and cost of maintenance, basically?
Let me take that. On the new users coming to industry, I think we have seen the down cycle. I think things are looking better than earlier. Again, we are wary of a lot of the macroeconomic factors that are impacting the market, including tariffs and including largely FIIs being negative from the market, has also impacted significantly the way market would have grown otherwise. I think we are waiting for that kind of clear signal to be there, where people have started or FIIs have started putting money in India. I think that can be a good indicator to say that now things are on the positive cycle. As of now, it doesn't look like it's obvious. We might need to wait for a few more quarters to say that we are in the next cycle of growth.
Definitely we are away from the bottom yet, as of now. On the second side, on the cost to serve as well as cost to grow. The cost to serve, we look at is largely a tech related cost. They are obviously as the revenue per transaction grows, our cost to serve actually goes down. At the same time, with AI coming in, all of our tech related AI costs will come as a part of cost to serve. There might be a slight bit of increase, but we don't see that increase to be proportional to the revenue. As a percentage, we expect that it will be kind of slightly lower. Obviously there will be absolute basis increases that keep on happening. On the cost to grow, largely, the spend has been more or less consistent on an absolute basis.
If you look at between last year and this year, we would have spent very similar to INR 450 crore-INR 500 crore is kind of a spend, and we will keep on increasing this a little bit, but it's not going to be again linear in terms of revenue. It will be more to kind of build new brands. W coming in might have some spends attached to it. 915 coming in might have some spends attached to it, but it'll always be, again, likely it'll be lower than the growth in the revenue.
Thank you very much, sir. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Vivek Gautam. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question.
Am I audible?
Yes, sir. Please proceed.
Yeah. I just wanted to understand about the opportunity size and the expected growth rate you can have, and more importantly, about the differentiator for us versus the competition which is helping us in Groww. Any concern on the SEBI and government who would like to sort of curb the speculation in options, especially for the retail traders who are major segment of our class. How do we mitigate? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll take that. From an opportunity point of view, so we look forward, we'll continue compounding on our core business where there are new investors coming in. In the opening statement, we spoke about the penetration which is possible in the country and we will continue trying to gain a larger and larger market share. That builds one dimension of opportunity where there are new investors coming in, and they are participating various products that we have. The other dimension is launching new products and services for some of the segment of the users, like wealth is one of them, 915 is another one. We are able to make more products available for a particular segment of users. These all create opportunities for future. Sorry, what was your second question?
Second question was regarding the differentiators for us versus the.
Yeah. We believe that we continue investing in building an experience for user, which converts into a higher retention for us. Because the users who come in on our platform, they stay longer. They are able to participate in different products, in different market scenarios with their different preferences. With the technology investment that we do, we are able to create some differential experiences in terms of their activation, in terms of their engagement on the product. This will continue to be our differentiator and we'll continue investing in that.
The last was about the regulation from the government side, trying to curb the speculations, secondary market, and stats with 90% of the customers losing money and gaming application one fine day being banned all of a sudden. What are the steps we are taking to mitigate that?
We have been operating in a regulated space for the last, like since we started. We do participate with our regulators on a very regular basis on all the concerns that they have. Their concerns are pretty much what our concerns are. All of us are trying to work in the favor of investors. Ultimately, we want to create wealth for our customers. Anything that comes up, we'll participate with them and we'll try to solve it in industry level.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Dipanjan Ghosh. Please unmute yourself and proceed with the question.
Hi. Good evening. Hope I'm audible.
Yes, sir. Please proceed.
Yeah. Hi. The first question was in terms of the MTF book. Obviously, I mean, for you, the MTF book has been on a rising trajectory. Now, what I wanted to understand is, if you look at the customers who are taking the MTF proposition on your platform, have you done any study to understand, I mean, are they new to MTF customers or these are customers who have been onboarded once you started the MTF journey and they are kind of acquainted with the product class? Or this would be like existing customers who were probably availing this product through a competitor's platform, and now that you are also offering the product, they have kind of shifted the platform. Some color on that would be useful. The second question is on the platform ARPU. I mean, that is almost back to pre-November 2024 levels.
Again, I mean, is there any work that you have done to understand, is it like weaker customers who got weeded out of the platform or went into dormancy? Or is it you guys are acquiring high-quality new customers or maybe the existing customers just got acclimatized to the new regime, whether it's incremental taxation or incremental regulation? Finally, one housekeeping question. If you can give the average MTF book for the quarter, that will be useful.
Let me take that. On MTF, I think there is no study as such that we have done, but our understanding is that MTF for us is not an acquisition product. It is mostly our existing customers are using MTF. Earlier they might be doing intraday instead of MTF is one use case, where customers now are holding onto their positions for longer is one big use case. Second thing, it's very difficult for us to actually even figure it out that if the customer were doing MTF outside or doing it in-house. What we know is that most of our customers are unique to us, and they only transact with us. Hence the likelihood of the customers doing MTF somewhere else and doing rest of the things here is unlikely, especially on the cash segment side. The second question, the second part of the...
I think we will figure out on the average. If we want to disclose, then we'll come back to you on that part. I forgot, the second question was on the ARPU, sir. ARPU was actually a more complicated reason why we're where we are today. It's a mix of the penetration of FNO going down, which led to actually the ARPU overall at a platform level going down. At the same time, with MTF coming in, commodities coming in, the ARPU actually went up. It's a combination of these two factors which has helped us kind of reach the pre-November numbers. It is not because, again, people have started trading or FNO has again started penetrating more. The penetration of FNO is still in, like 10% around range, which used to be like 18 odd% before November.
Okay, thanks. Ishan, just a small follow-up. You can disclose the average MTF for the quarter later, but in terms of the unwinding that the industry has seen in March, would you be in line with it? You would have fared better. Any qualitative color?
We also saw a peak somewhere in between. I think probably February end was, or I don't remember actually, January end or February end, we actually peaked, and then there was a dip. This number is after the dip. The average will be probably closer to this or slightly higher than this also is possible. Obviously things are again, April is better than March from a market perspective as well.
Got it, Ishan and the team, and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Abhijeet Sakhare. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question.
Hello, everyone. My first question is a broad question on the platform. Now, you guys are fairly large, and in some ways a bit more mature. Now, do you see any demand for services like stock advisory or recommendations, at least from the more mature set of customers? And whether that's really the case, and if yes, then how are you ensuring that you continue to retain some of those mature customers on the platform? The second question is on the Groww Prime. If you can indicate when do you plan to extend it to existing customers? And I have a couple of data questions after that. Thank you.
Let me take this, Abhijeet. This is a good thing. I think we have seen this demand for long now, like stock advisory, MF advisory. It's probably one of the highest asked question in our voice of customer. We have been thinking about it. We will launch it when the timing is right, when we have the right solution, and so on. The second one, Prime. Again, our philosophy has always been craft the product, which is the delta between our solution and what exists should be a huge delta, right? Prime, we have been devising the product for some time now. It is available to some customers, and we feel that it will be in a position for existing customers. Again, we don't want to give the timeline, but we are optimistic about the creation of a product that our customers would love.
Got it. Okay, a couple of data questions, if you could share. What was the share of MTF in the fourth quarter cash ADTO? If you could share that number. On the cost- to- operate, there was a comment in the letter on some risk-related costs. If you could explain that. How do we think about the entire cost-to-operate growth for the next year as well?
I think we'll get back to you on the percentage. My guess is it is still between 5%-10%. It hasn't significantly changed. The exact number, we'll come back to you. The second part, the cost to operate, like you said, there is a risk-related cost, which again, because of the volatility that we saw, both on the commodity side and then on the equity side. February was more on commodity side when gold and silver significantly moved in a day or two. There was square-off related, you can say, negative balances that people went in, and which we accounted for in cost to operate. The second piece happened during the March time when Iran war started and there was significant volatility in some of the stocks.
Whereas in MTF, we actually accounted for some of the negative balances, and which we have put it into our P&L as cost- to- operate. Going forward, with the exception of these risk-related costs, I think you can assume that this will grow in Q1 with the appraisal cycle. There will be a one-time increase, and after that, we expect it to be more or less stable for the rest of the year.
Okay. Thank you, Ishan. Thank you, Lalit.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Madhur Sharma. Please unmute yourself and proceed, ma'am.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. First, on cost to operate. Ishan, do you mean it will remain stable as percentage of revenue?
No. In absolute, it will increase in the Q1 because of the appraisals. After that, in absolute, it will remain stable. All of this, which I am saying, is primarily talking about Groww as a platform. The AMC business and the Fisdom business will still have more investments in terms of hiring as well, which will increase the cost for that business. For Groww as a platform, these costs will become stable after Q1.
Right. Understood. Thank you. Second, Lalit mentioned about how we are investing in AI and how it is going to improve customer experience as well as back end. Lalit, can you highlight few key initiatives that we are implementing in near term?
Madhur, so seeing from productivity side, I think the entire SDLC, which is software development lifecycle, AI is kind of changing that completely, right? From the overall company operations perspective, and then on the customer experience side, our customer support, for example, and then we also launched GR1, which is like a co-pilot, customer can research and all. There are a bunch of places like this and all these are like internally we haven't disclosed the percentage of code and percentage of this thing kind of done by AI, but we are seeing a meaningful kind of difference in our kind of way of working.
Okay. Do you expect the number of engineers, basically people who are involved in coding, to go down in coming years in a meaningful way?
Madhur, the way we look at it is, see, we are in a journey where we are building lot of things.
Mm-hmm.
Currently, how we think it is, with the same strength, can we ship more, can we ship faster, and can we ship higher quality, right?
Mm-hmm.
If you look at the trajectory also of last 4 years or so, right? Number of products that we have launched in last 4 years is like, I think we had 3, 4 products 4 years back, and now we have 12 products and still launching more and so on, right?
Yeah.
We have been able to do all this with the strength, more or less similar kind of strength, right?
Mm-hmm.
This is how kind of we like to see, where with the existing strength, we can launch lot of new products. All the new products that we launch, we carve out a team from within our existing folks.
Understood. Thank you. Lastly, [datakeeping] question. Ishan, if you can tell me the revenue from Fisdom and AMC business.
Lalit, do you have top of your mind? Sorry, I don't remember.
No worries. I'll reach out to Kunal for that. Thank you. That was all from my side.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Dheeraj Toshniwal. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question.
Yeah, hi. Am I audible?
Yes, sir.
With the cost to serve and cost to grow kind of growing slower than the revenue growth rate and cost to operate, as you're mentioning, will be kind of stabilized. How should one think about margins going forward? What is the margin run rate or exit margin you're looking at for the next year?
It's, I think, again, correlated with the revenue growth. I think revenue growth has a lot of levers attached to it, so it's very difficult for us to put a number to the revenue growth. We keep on saying that if our revenue grows beyond, let's say, 15%, then probably the margin will keep on expanding. If it grows 30%, probably the expansion will be more. If it grows slightly lower, then the margin will not expand. That is like the formula, but it's difficult to predict how much will be the real revenue growth in the next year.
Okay. Got it. If we want to carve out the cost of acquisition, like the number we gave in last letter, but I think we have not given this time, how much was the cost of acquisition?
Cost to Groww is largely cost to acquisition. It'll be more or less the same number. Quarterly also, it hasn't significantly changed. What we have learned is that, again, marketing cost is more or less consistent, at least on an annual basis. There is a little bit of volatility because of IPL, but it has become largely a fixed number for us.
Shall we see more because of IPL? Shall we see because of more advertisement and all the little higher spends in Q1 or-
Q1 is generally slightly higher. In last year, I think we were conservative. I think this year we'll probably do slightly more than the last year.
Okay, got it. One more question on the, I mean, the rationale for changing the calculation of this market share is, I think my understanding that exchange anyways does buy and sell the overall trade as one, the count as one. I think this industry also kind of reports like that only, your competition also. Just wanted some sense why we have kind of seen the way we have shown the market share?
There are multiple reasons. One of the big reason is that internally, this is how we look at it, and we feel that we should be more transparent in showing what we look at, and that is the possibility also, right? If you look at tomorrow, how much market share we can have is what we want to kind of target, not really how will it look like from a calculation perspective. We think this is a better assessment of market share, than what we were doing earlier, and hence we have kind of moved to this.
Got it. That is very helpful. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you. The next question is from Sampreet Sharma. Please unmute yourself and proceed, sir.
Good evening, everyone. I hope I'm audible. Just one question from my side. What is the company's thoughts on the emergence of these new age fee-only brokers? Essentially how do you see the market landscape shifting according to that?
Lalit, do you want to take it?
Sorry. Sampreet, you mean new age zero fee or low fee, fixed fee?
Zero fee broker.
Zero fee.
Fee only.
Fee only. I think we see, currently our thought process is, let's say if we don't talk about competitors, if we just think from the value perspective that we provide to the customer, our philosophy is that give more value to customer than you charge. We feel that it's also fair for customers, they are paying on per transaction basis and so on. We also see that customers are kind of happy with that, so we haven't thought about that.
Do you see any significant movement the way the industry works because of the emergence of such players?
We'll keep a watch, Sampreet, but as of now, we don't see that.
Fair enough. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll take the last question for today from Raghav Maheshwari. Please unmute yourself and proceed, sir. Mr. Maheshwari, please proceed, sir. I'm sorry, sir, you're inaudible. As there was no response, we'll take the last question from Gaurav Singhal. Please unmute yourself and proceed.
Okay. Thanks for taking my question, and thanks for taking our time. Just a few questions. One is, for the industry, we have seen the NSE active clients kind of plateauing out at around 50 million for a while now. For Groww, obviously, the client growth has been quite good because of market share gain. Eventually, of course, the industry needs to grow. The analogy you drew in your opening remarks was that there are 500 million-600 million people who shop actively online. To get this 50 million industry number, let's say 100 over time, what gives you that confidence that the industry can keep expanding rapidly as it did in the last five years? That was my first question.
Secondly, are we hitting any open interest limit on these single scrip products like Sensex options or some of the other products because of our scale? Thirdly, what's our settlement cycle right now in terms of repatriating cash balances or the client cash balances back to their bank accounts? What is the thinking of the regulators on reducing or increasing this time period? Which would obviously impact our interest income. Thank you.
Let me take this. The growth rate of this industry is actually driven a lot based on which kind of market we are in, right? If you look at in the last 1.5 years, we have been in the more volatile market, but before that, we were in a bull run, and that was the time when large part of the customer base kind of grew. This keeps on happening. If you look at in the last 20 years history of stock market also, the industry growth rate typically comes in those bull runs, and then it stabilize a bit, and then again it happens, right? When will it happen will depend on when will the next bull run comes. That is the time when market will expand.
Typically that time the expansion is very, very high, so it's not 5%- 10%. The growth rates are typically significantly higher. If you look at a longer frame, the industry is growing like a 10%-15% CAGR. On the questions on settlement, I think that I remember now is basically it is on the customer demand. Customers have today broadly three options. They can do bill-to-bill settlement, they can do monthly settlement, or they can do quarterly settlement. Quarterly settlement today is like an obligation that you can't go beyond that, and we do whatever the customer has chosen. For quarterly settlement, it is done on the first month of the quarter, and monthly settlement done on the first week of the month.
The bill-to-bill settlement is as and when the bill is posted and next day you do the settlement when the actual settlement happen from the exchange side as well. Sorry, I forgot the second question that you asked.
For this settlement cycle, the limit, which is quarter now. It seems to have kept going down. What is the regulator's thinking on this? Does it keep going down or have we now-
It has been quarterly since last 10 years now, and I think it is again a choice. We haven't seen a customer choosing bill-to-bill settlement significantly more than monthly or quarterly. Actually, quarterly is probably what most customers want because it's a lot more convenient. If we do a quarterly settlement, whenever the quarterly settlement happens, a lot of customers actually get surprised at why their money was refunded and so on, and it becomes inconvenient for a lot of customers. We don't look at it less from our income perspective, but think it more from what customer wants, and provide them in a more seamless and a more trustful way and do it.
If you look at, we give option of instant withdrawals, where in the day also if you want to take money out, you can withdraw, and the money will come to your bank account within few seconds.
Just lastly, if you are hitting any limits on these, li ke single scrip option or interest here.
We talked about it last quarter also. On average we are less than half of it on the limit side. In the last quarter we haven't hit that limit at all for any day or any scrip.
All right. Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you. As that was the last question for today, I now hand over the conference back to Kunal for closing comments. Thank you and over to you.
Thank you everyone for joining the call today. Feel free to reach out to us for any questions or clarifications. Have a good week.
Thank you.
Thank you, members of the management. On behalf of Groww, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us and you may exit the meeting now. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, sir.