Digital broker Upstox eyes 3-4x growth in customer base in 2021

Ratan Tata- and Tiger Global-backed digital broker Upstox is eyeing a customer base of 6-8 million by end-2021 as it rides on the trend of record number of first-time retail stock owners opening trading accounts in the country, co-founder and CEO Ravi Kumar has said.

This will be almost a three- to four-fold increase from the customer base of 2.3 million as of end-December 2020. Upstox saw a 4x growth (300 per cent increase) in customer base in 2020 to 2.3 million. Most of the customers are millennials — the average age of more than 75 per cent of the company’s customers is less than 35 years.

The average daily cash turnover on the platform went up by around 2.5x from January to December 2020. The firm witnessed a growth of 5x in account-opening by women in 2020; roughly 61 per cent of these women are first-time customers. More than 30 per cent of Upstox women customers are housewives.

Backed by its mobile-trading platform, Upstox achieved the 1-million customer mark in June 2020 and added the next 1 million in less than five months. Interestingly, over 85 per cent of Upstox customers place their daily trades on their mobilephones.

Digital first

“We are a digital business. The potential is there to record the same 3-4x growth in customer base in 2021 as we did it in 2020. The growth has been steep for us. As we accelerate scale, we think there is a big opportunity in grabbing a large part of the market. We think equity participation is going to be led by tier II and III towns. We want to be the partner of choice for the upcoming new generation of traders and investors in smaller towns,” Kumar said.

Nearly 80 per cent Upstox’s customers are from tier II and III towns (Nashik, Jaipur, Guntur, Patna, Kannur, Tiruvallur and Nainital, among others).

“We are investing in the next generation of tech stack. This will help us scale up aggressively. On an average, we onboard 2-3 lakh customers every month. We are mostly on cloud already, and scaling up is going to be easy for us.”

For 2021, Kumar said that Upstox will get into content creation, especially education-oriented videos for investors, which he sees as an area of potential. “We want to get into content curation, content discovery and curate experience that is unique to investors using smartphones to trade.”