

India’s legacy brokers bank on leveraged trading to claw back lost ground
India’s traditional brokers are banking on a business they dominate to claw back the ground they ceded to digital rivals over the past decade: lending clients money for leveraged trading.Called the margin trading facility (MTF) in market parlance, it allows investors to buy shares by paying only a part of the total value upfront, with the broker funding the rest at an interest cost.MTF book surged 42.9% in the year through January 2026 to ₹1.20 lakh crore even as the markets turned volatile, according to a February Care Edge report. The top two in the category are bank-backed brokers: ICICI Securities Ltd and Kotak Securities Ltd.
The initial two put together make up 31.7% of the total MTF market share as of December, according to ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank’s investor presentation.“In MTF, bank-based brokerages have a larger share when compared to the discount brokers. We lost on derivatives as discount brokers took that opportunity.
On the MTF side, we took the opportunity,” said Dhiraj Relli, managing director and chief executive officer at HDFC Securities Ltd.Legacy brokers see long-term headroom in the category.At about ₹1.2 trillion (around $13.2 billion), MTF accounts for about 0.25% of the Indian equity market’s $5 trillion market capitalization, according to Ashish Nanda, chief business digital officer at Kotak Securities. “Compared to China and the US, which are in the range of 1.5% to 3% when it comes to the leverage book, we are significantly smaller.
MTF book in my view will continue to grow.”The focus on MFT comes as discount brokers have taken over the market on the back of derivative trading. Groww, the country’s largest broker, has a market share of 28% in the overall broking segment and a total
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