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This week we wrapped up year #7 working on connecting India to the world. What a journey it has been so far working with an amazing team, trusting customers and solving problems that have never been solved before.
We took this opportunity to look back on a few highlights of the year that was:
- We crossed $1B in assets! Personally this has been our biggest milestone so far for me. That customers have trusted Vested with more than INR 10,000 crores meant a lot
- This year we launched Private Markets and Global Funds. Both went from 0 → $10M in assets in under a year
- It really was great to see our customers be able to invest in SpaceX via our Private Markets Fund at 30% of its IPO price. Something that was a dream for a lot of us until now
- We hosted 10+ Global Investor Group (GIG) offline events, published the first edition of How India Invests Globally and launched GlobeEd, India’s first Global Investing learning hub
- In addition to our US licenses, we received two GIFT City IFSCA licenses – first the Broker Dealer + Global Access Provider and second the Payment Service Provider. The weirdest coincidence – The registration number for both our entities is 009, a number considered super auspicious in our family 🙂
While we are at it, let us walk you through a few other interesting aspects of Year 7.
Financials
We were profitable for all of year 7, generating an overall net income of INR 30 crore+. The flexibility that profitability gives you is immense.
As a business operating in the global investing space in India, we face two unique challenges:
- The $250k LRS cap per investor and the 20% TCS above INR10 Lakhs of remittances means that it is unlikely that deposits will grow exponentially each year
- Indian residents are not allowed to borrow funds on margin or to trade in foreign derivatives. Both of these drive majority of the revenue for new-age brokers worldwide be it Robinhood in the US or Zerodha/Groww in India
Because of point 2, reaching sizable revenue and profit in this space requires a significant scale of assets (so that there is enough trading volume to monetize) and to get to scale requires time because of the inherent limits mentioned in point 1.
We have been incredibly lucky to have had patient investor capital + a first mover advantage to be able to get to a self-sustaining scale over these 7 years.
Trading volume and gains
As Einstein said – ‘Compounding interest is the 8th wonder of the world’. In our, or rather in any business’s, case compounding growth is what enables fast scaling. Over the last year we first-hand saw the impact of compounding on our trading volume growth.
We crossed $7B in cumulative trading volume. Our first billion in volume took us 48 months while the last came in 2.5 months – that’s the beauty of compounding.
Another interesting aspect during the year was to see how our customer base is generating profits and hence fresh dollars for India as a country. As we scale further, profits made from investing globally will help balance FPI outflows or even fund a deficit in other years. More on this in the below note:
Other noteworthy happenings
We launched our first ever brand campaign to emphasise what we stand for – a focused ‘Global Investing Specialist’ that gives you access to the widest range of global assets and a variety of value-add features to go with it. Hope at least some of you saw the film.
We also launched our partnership with ET Money this year. Now customers can start building their global portfolios via Vested within their existing broking or investing platforms the likes of ET Money, HDFC Securities, Axis Securities or even via their existing RIAs or Distributors.
Last but not the least, we had our first international offsite. As a remote team, we value every second of in-person time we get and nothing better than three days at a resort together!
What’s next
Over the last 7 years we have successfully completed our 0 → 10 journey. 0 → 1 was proving that an Indian resident could and would want to buy US stocks seamlessly. 1 → 10 was showcasing that there is enough demand to build a sustainable business.
Now we progress to our 10 → 100 phase; our focus is clear – solving cross-border investing problems for Indians across the world. We have a lot of exciting launches coming up in the next few months – stay tuned!
Thank you for your consistent support so far. Onwards 🚀
Viram Shah
Founder and CEO