Now you can open an account for free in Zerodha: Company removed account opening fee; Demat accounts in India increased 5 times in 6 years

Investors can now open a free demat account on trading and investment platform Zerodha. The company said on Wednesday that now investors living in India will not be charged any charge for opening a demat account.

The company said that the onboarding process of opening an account has now become completely digital, hence the company has taken this decision. Earlier, there was no facility of e-signing through Aadhaar for opening a demat account, due to which there was an offline process for opening a demat account. Therefore the company used to charge for account opening.

There was no e-sign process till 2016-17.

The company said, ‘When we launched Zerodha, we deliberately decided to charge for opening an account for two reasons. There was no Aadhaar or e-sign process till 2016-17.

The account opening process was completely offline, which meant there were costs involved. So we had to impose an account opening charge to cover the cost. However, many trading platforms including Groww, Angel One are already opening free demat accounts.