'Took us 6 years to get 60,000 customers': Zerodha CEO on life before digitisation

By Ankita Sengupta

Zerodha CEO and co-founder Nithin Kamath on Saturday revealed how laborious the process of onboarding customers was before digitisation. He said that each customer of the stock brokerage site had to sign and courier forms that included more than 40 pages and wait for days for the confirmation. With digitisation and the use of technologies such as Digilocker, eKYC, and eSign, it has become easier and faster for customers to open accounts and access financial services, he added.

"It took us 6 years to get to our first 60K customers, each of whom had to sign and courier 40+ pages of forms and wait for days. We got to 1 crore customers in the next 6, entirely eliminating paper in the process. This was enabled by eKYC, digital signatures (eSign), and digital documents (Digilocker)," Kamath posted on X, formerly Twitter.

He added that with digitisation there has been a steep increase in productivity, savings, and an "exponential" huge reduction in wastage for companies and customers. "Hundreds of millions of pages that didn’t have to be printed and transported and valuable customer time that didn’t have to be wasted. Most of our time in the first six years was spent figuring out how to send forms back and forth collecting documents," Nithin Kamath shared.

"We had about 900 on the team in late 2017 with around 5 lakh customers. Today, we have 1.3 crore customers with about 1,100 on the team. And this while our customer support quality has improved significantly. We have done many other things right, but doing away with the physical process has helped exponentially."

It took us 6 years to get to our first 60k customers, each of whom had to sign and courier 40+ pages of forms and wait for days. We got to 1 crore customers in the next 6, entirely eliminating paper in the process. This was enabled by eKYC, digital signatures (eSign), & digital… pic.twitter.com/dDsImjCAQp

— Nithin Kamath (@Nithin0dha) September 23, 2023

The billionaire head of the country's largest stock broking site added that digitisation also reduced customer onboarding risk significantly by cutting off multiple intermediaries and dealing with the customers directly with their digital identity, signature, and mandatory online in-person verification (IPV).