Zerodha also has made it as seamless as zerodha amc charges possible for you to add and withdraw funds, but it’s not a part of any banking ecosystem like that of ICICI, here you need to add a Primary or a Secondary bank account through which you can transfer funds into Zerodha, the time it takes to reflect in your trading account depends on the method of transfer.
Fund withdrawal, however, cannot be as quick as it can be with ICICI Direct account linked with an ICICI Bank account though.
Both offer UPI-based transfers as well. Zerodha being more user-friendly when it comes to UPI transfers.
- Pledging Shares for margins
Note: the concept of pledging has changed recently. Earlier shares used to leave your account and go to the broker’s margin account. Now after the Karvy fiasco, where pledged shares were misused, the system has changed: shares are marked as pledged in your demat account (they don’t leave the account).
Zerodha beats ICICI Direct hands down on this one, the pledging process actually has two legs, first part is on the brokers side, where the broker has to allow you to pledge Shares, Mutual Funds and ETFs select them all of that, and then is the second part which is the same for all, as this is the OTP authorization process.
Zerodha is incredibly transparent and easy when it comes to pledging Shares, Mutual funds and ETFs.
On a related but different note, earlier ICICI direct used to offer Loan against securities and Zerodha didn’t, but now Zerodha also has an NBFC license and it also seamlessly offers loans against securities.
- Product/Service Integration
Typically one broker cannot provide all value-added services and features its users need, this is where product integration helps.
Zerodha again has been a pioneer in this space in many ways, at the moment it offers Integration with three products, Sensibull which is an Options analysis platform, SmallCase which offers baskets of stocks ETF similar to curated portfolios, which allows for a single click execution, Quicko a tax planning and filing product, and TradingView if you want to include that too.
Our pick on Product / Service Integrations: Zerodha
- Customer Service Reliability
ICICI Direct has been a full-service broker has always had better service levels compared to Zerodha. Even today it’s relatively easy for one to get through to their Customer service on the phone than Zerodha.
However, Zerodha has a fairly efficient ticket resolution process.
Talking about reliability if you look at social media reports you would definitely find more instances of Zerodha’s trading platform being down, compared to ICICI Direct, but that could also be due to the relatively active, tech-savvy clientele that Zerodha caters to.
If you are an investor, these glitches should not bother you at all, as they last for anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours and if you are an active trader, you should definitely plan for such events and have necessary backups.
