India Infoline owns the country's largest retail brokerage network, had laid out plans to wind down its retail brokerage division. This comes as the public is moving away from equities and towards gold and fixed deposits at a time when stock trading values are at an all time high.
IIFL, which is seeking the issuance of banking license, had created a bit of controversy back in 2002 through the offer of INR0.05 per trade on offered customers accounts. It would focus more on providing loans of all kinds to the Indian middle class sector. The current retail clients would be shifting to mutual funds and insurance products from IIFL, as indicated by IIFL Chairman Nimal Jain.
Jain said, "We will encourage closure of roughly 90% of the total INR10 lakh odd retail accounts for direct equities in the next 12 to 18 months and move them to mutual funds, bonds, insurance products. The retail broking(sic) business was relatively insignificant in the total business mix it contributed 6% of our total revenue. We will absorb close to 2,000 employees of our retail equities in our existing consumer finance or financial products business."
Join the Conversation