How tech startups are disrupting traditional stock trading with smart apps

Let's say you're a retail investor who wants to put some money in some stocks of large US-listed firms. What do you do? You go to a big brokerage firm, probably associated with a well-known bank or an established financial services firm. The relationship manager gives you a list of documents required to open a demat account. It takes about a week on average to make your account live. Then, you receive some recommendations from the brokerage firm to invest in some stocks. You either go by the advice or use your own intuition to pick up a few. Also, for investing in US stocks, you may be required to maintain a minimum balance of $10,000, and pay a transaction fee of around $50 per order. In this cumbersome process, there is little guarantee that you will actually gain from the investment.

Now, let's think of another scenario. You download a mobile app from the trading platform of a discount-based brokerage firm. This app provides you stock recommendations drawn from the best research firms such as Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Nomura. It takes few minutes to open a demat account for trading in US stocks. And you avail all these benefits with an investment corpus of $100, which is a fraction of the $10,000 that traditional brokerage firms were asking you. What's more, the transaction charges is only $5 per order.