Online brokerages see spurt in biz in Mar amid nationwide lockdown

New Delhi: At a time when traditional brokers are struggling to continue their services due to nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus pandemic , online brokerages , including Upstox, 5paisa.com and Angel Broking, have seen a spurt in business. The current crisis seems to be a blessing in disguise for these brokerages, as their number of clients as well as orders increased in March. Actually with markets being volatile client activity has increased and business has shown decent growth this month, said Prakarsh Gagdani, CEO, 5Paisa.com. Though our customer support on telephone is not working, the company is answering all client queries on emails and hence are able to manage everything properly, he added. "Even our existing customers have rewarded us by doing more than two million trades in a single day creating a new record last month," he added. Upstox said it is witnessing unprecedented increase in trading volumes and demand for opening new accounts. The online discount broker said it had witnessed about 55 per cent increase in the number of orders in March compared to the previous month. Further, it also expects to beat its earlier industry record of 1 lakh new client additions in a single month. Apart from these, investment platform Smallcase Technologies has also seen an increase in its new investor numbers in March. The platform has registered a 1.5 times increase in new investors in March compared to the previous month.