Bengaluru: There was a time when becoming a stock market investor involved more effort than downloading an app.
You had to walk into a brokerage branch, open an account, meet a relationship manager and leave with a stack of research reports. Brokers printed sector reports, company notes and weekly newsletters in booklets.
For Angel One, founded in 1996 by Dinesh Thakkar as a traditional stockbroking house called Angel Broking, research was an acquisition strategy. By the early 2000s, it had research teams across over 100 branches, and at 8.30 every morning, they would hold a standing call with researchers across locations. The idea was that good research would bring customers through the door, and those customers would eventually transact.
But banks already had branches, customers and the ability to sell a three-in-one account combining banking, broking and demat services for investors to hold and manage securities electronically. For a standalone broker such as Angel One, competing meant building its own physical network.
That meant high-street branches, ground-floor real estate and local sales teams.
Then the internet changed the equation.
The shift to digital fundamentally altered the economics of the brokerage business. Instead of spending on branches, sales teams and research staff to bring customers in, the company could acquire them through its app and digital channels at a much lower cost.
Angel Broking began moving away from the branch-led model towards digital acquisition, eventually shutting its physical footprint and sales force. By the time it listed in 2020, the company was already making the transition, although investors were not yet convinced that a digital, flat-fee brokerage could work at scale.
As it expanded to include mutual funds, loans, insurance and wealth management, the company rebranded to Angel One in 2021 to reflect its broader digital financial services. These would all be eventually folded under one ‘super app’.
The company went on to build a large digital customer base, more than doubling its customers from 4.12 million in March 2021 to 9.2 million by March 2022 without the branches and salespeople that had once been central to its business.
Today, however, the 30-year-old company is shrinking. It shed nearly 20% of its workforce through 2025–26, as per its latest annual report. According to current and former employees Mint spoke with, several senior executives have exited even as Ambarish Kenghe, who joined as group chief executive in March 2025 from Google Pay, steers the company through another reset.
Navigating change
Thakkar and Kenghe face a challenging environment, particularly in Angel One’s core stockbroking business, as they lead the company’s latest transformation into a digital-first full-stack financial platform.
The economics of trading are changing, with regulatory intervention, softer derivatives activity and intensifying competition from discount broking rivals, including market leaders Groww and Zerodha.
“Last year, the broking industry lost about 40 lakh (4 million) active clients, about 8%, its steepest decline in a decade,” said Eshaan Lazarus, founder and CEO, 021 Trade, a discount broking platform. “Even this financial year, active clients are declining by 1–2 lakh a month. No broker can take customer acquisition for granted.”
Angel One was quick to take note. The company has been closing the gap with Zerodha as it doubles down on advisory and personalisation and uses its super app as a differentiator to extract more value from its customers. That is increasingly important as Groww and Zerodha have done better at monetising their users beyond the core broking business, according to industry experts.
Angel One is also working on making its interface simpler and more user-friendly, an area where it has struggled in the past.
But the broader competition is moving faster. Macquarie Capital, in a 24 September report, said it expects Angel One’s revenue to grow at 10% annually through FY30, below the 17–18% compound annual growth rate it estimates for the industry’s total addressable market. For Groww, it forecasts 25% revenue growth, driven by customer acquisition, cross-selling and expansion to new products.
Angel One has spent the past decade proving it can adapt. Its next test is turning the customer base into a sustainable growth engine as the economics of online broking begin to shift again.
The old playbook
For years, discount brokers could grow by doing two things: bringing more people into the market and getting them to trade more often. That playbook is getting harder to sustain.
Regulatory changes have hit one of the biggest engines of retail trading: derivatives. The Securities and Exchange Board of India has raised the minimum contract size for index derivatives, reduced weekly expiries to one per benchmark index per exchange, increased margin requirements around expiry, and tightened position-limit rules.
The government also raised the securities transaction tax on derivatives.
The changes were aimed at curbing excessive retail participation in equity derivatives as a majority of individual traders were losing money. Sebi’s actions helped pare the aggregate losses of individual traders to ₹91,686 crore in FY26 from ₹1.12 trillion in the previous financial year.
But this had an expected bearing on trading activity. In FY26, the National Stock Exchange’s equity futures and options, or equity derivatives, turnover declined even as the broader derivatives market grew. Cash-market turnover also moderated. For brokers such as Angel One, which built scale during the retail trading boom, fewer trades can mean fewer opportunities to earn transaction-linked revenue.
Angel One is also facing a tougher competitive market.
Groww’s NSE active-client base reached about 13.1 million in July, nearly double Angel One’s 6.6 million. In commodities derivatives, Groww marginally overtook Angel One in the first quarter of FY27 (April–June 2026) with an average daily turnover (ADTO) of ₹2.4 trillion against Angel One’s ₹2.37 trillion.
ADTO, which measures the average value of trades executed by a broker each trading day over a specific period, is a key indicator of trading activity and market share.
Extracting value
Angel One does not see the regulatory changes and strong competition as a sign of a shrinking opportunity. “We are not buying for each other’s customers,” said Amit Majumdar, the company’s chief strategy officer. About 70% of Angel One’s customers, he said, are new to the capital markets, suggesting that the industry is still reaching first-time investors rather than merely fighting over existing traders.
But customer numbers tell only part of the story. The more revealing comparison is what these customers are generating.
In FY26, Angel One reported revenue of about ₹5,137 crore and net profit of ₹915 crore. Groww, despite having lower revenue of ₹4,644 crore, reported a much higher net profit of ₹2,083 crore. Zerodha remains further ahead on both measures, with about ₹8,800 crore in revenue and ₹4,283 crore in profit.
Angel One’s own numbers show the gap between acquisition and engagement. Its total client base reached about 39.03 million in July, up 18.1% from a year earlier, but orders grew only 9.5%. Gross client additions, however, declined about 27%. Its average client funding book rose 39% to ₹7,081 crore.
Average client funding book, or the average daily credit extended by a broker to its clients, is a critical metric that serves as a primary engine for a stockbroker’s profitability, client engagement, and financial risk.
Vijay Laxmi A. Ambala, a Sebi-registered research analyst and co-founder of Stock Market Today, said Angel One’s challenge is visible in the gap between customer acquisition and customer engagement. The growth in the funding book, she added, suggests that the next phase is increasingly about getting more value from its existing customer base rather than simply adding accounts.
That is also where the industry is heading. Groww is expanding beyond its core broking franchise, while Zerodha has built businesses around mutual funds and loans against securities.
Angel One is making the same calculation. Interest income and distribution have grown to account for about a third of its revenue, up from 17% in FY23, Lazarus of 021 points out.
Groww has gained market share, while Zerodha has maintained its profitability. Where does that leave Angel One? Its answer is to effectively turn the brokerage into a super app.
A financial supermarket
Earlier, a brokerage’s relationship with a trader largely revolved around market hours. Angel One wants that relationship to continue throughout the day, across products.
“During market hours, the customer is engaged in transactions. Post-market hours, he is engaged for confirmations. After confirmations, then there are commodities, mutual funds, insurance, content,” Majumdar said. The result, he said, is that Angel One is increasingly becoming a “24x7 communication engine”.
Angel One broadly sees three areas as its core profit pools: equity and capital markets, wealth, and credit. “The way the customer is evolving, the platform is evolving,” Majumdar said. That thinking is also pushing Angel One into areas it had previously avoided.
Insurance is one example. For years, the company chose an open-architecture model, distributing third-party insurance rather than building or manufacturing products itself. Majumdar said the complexity of underwriting and claims, particularly for larger-ticket policies and products linked to health outcomes, made insurance difficult to deliver entirely through a digital model. That approach is now changing.
Angel One has entered into a joint venture with Livwell, a Singapore-based company that has developed digital insurance products. For Angel One, getting closer to the manufacturing side of insurance could also give it more control over the products offered to its customers.
The same logic is playing out in asset management. For much of its existence, Angel One’s asset management company remained focused on passive products. That was partly because the company wanted to offer customers who were taking higher risks in equities and derivatives at least one relatively less-risky investment option.
But newer customers, Majumdar said, are increasingly looking beyond passive products and choosing funds based on performance. Angel One now plans to broaden its AMC strategy and could add more comprehensive products in the next one or two quarters, he said.
And it is packing all of this—broking, mutual funds, insurance, credit and other investment products—into a single super app. The bet, central to Angel One’s strategy, is that keeping more of the customer’s financial life within one interface will make cross-selling easier.
The reset
Angel One is also making significant changes to its cost structure and organisation, according to the current and former employees who spoke with Mint. Functions including product, data and revenue went through significant restructuring last year.
The shift is visible in its permanent employee numbers, which fell to 2,934 in FY26 from 3,823 a year earlier.
The decline in headcount, however, did not mean a simple retreat on hiring. Employee benefit expenses continued to rise, suggesting the company was becoming more selective about the people and capabilities it was adding, including at senior levels, according to industry experts.
Angel One says the change was driven by a combination of natural attrition, selective rationalisation and hiring in areas it sees as important for its next phase of growth.
“Importantly, this is not about reducing headcount as an objective. It is about continuously aligning the organisation with where the business is headed and improving productivity as we scale,” Majumdar said.
Besides, the increasing use of artificial intelligence has reduced the time engineers and internal teams spend on tasks such as coding and analysing data.
“From inside what we are seeing is that the margin is expanding because customer acquisition has continued, [but] the platform does not need to add the same kind of cost that it was needing to add when it was getting evolved into a digital one,” Majumdar said.
The new Angel One
In its journey to becoming the market leader, Groww has shown how powerful simplicity can be in bringing first-time investors onto a platform. Angel One wants to bring that same simplicity to a much broader product universe. The challenge is that the more products Angel One adds, especially on one app, the harder that becomes.
“We want to get better at simplification from a UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) point of view,” Majumdar said. Instead of showing every product to every customer, the company wants its app to learn from a customer’s behaviour and personalise what they see when they log in.
Its recently launched Ask Angel is being developed to answer questions about portfolios and products as well to help customers navigate the platform.
Angel One wants the complexity of a financial-services conglomerate to feel as simple as a single app. But that may also be its biggest execution challenge. A customer who uses the Angel One app to trade may not use it for long-term savings or buying insurance, says 021 Trade’s Lazarus. “Each business needs specific capabilities and time to build trust.”
“Customers can easily access all sorts of financial products. Ease of access is not what’s holding them back. Handholding by a trusted intermediary is. A super app is not going to solve this issue,” he said.
Building a super app means expanding into multiple businesses while ensuring that the customer never feels the complexity underneath. The restructuring is ultimately about building an organisation capable of doing that. Whether the transformation delivers is yet to be seen.
- 10% | Macquarie’s forecast for Angel One’s FY26–30 revenue CAGR, versus 17–18% for the industry’s total addressable market.
- 39.03 million | Angel One’s total client base in July, up 18.1% from a year earlier. Gross client additions, however, declined about 27%.
- 2,934 | Angel One’s permanent employees in FY26, down from 3,823 a year earlier.