Angel One at crossroads after heady success

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Editor's note: For the longest time, Dinesh Thakkar, Angel One’s chairman and managing director, didn’t carry much weight in the Indian stock broking industry.  Today, Angel One is the most valuable listed retail brokerage in the country. It also has the third largest customer base, next to discount broking firms Zerodha and Upstox. For a brief period in April 2022, Thakkar almost became a billionaire when his stock peaked. That’s the richest anyone has got merely by being a stockbroker in the country. At the heart of this turnaround is the business’s ability to pull off a digital transformation in an attempt to take on both new and legacy competitors.  In the financial year 2021-22, Angel One’s profit shot up to Rs 625 crore from Rs 82 crore in 2019-20; it is expected to hit Rs 1,000 crore in 2022-23. Compare this to rival Zerodha, which expects to clock a net profit of nearly Rs 2,514 crore in 2022-23, The Economic Times reported—that’s twice as much as Angel’s. However, Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath expects that the broking business will shrink next fiscal …