India’s biggest retail broking apps are bringing Wall Street to the phone screen. Groww, Zerodha, Angel One and Upstox are rolling out access to US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) through regulated routes at GIFT City. Investing in American equities used to be mostly for wealthy clients of global banks and private wealth desks. Now it is turning into a mass-market product.
Early demand is going where the global AI trade has gone. Groww co-founder and chief operating officer Harsh Jain told CNBC that Nvidia, SpaceX, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Micron and Meta are the most popular names among early users. Groww accounts for more than 29 per cent of the roughly 46 million active clients on Indian broking platforms.
Who is offering what
Groww has opened the facility to all customers after a phased rollout earlier this month. It offers more than 10,000 US stocks and ETFs through its subsidiary Groww IFSC under the Global Access Provider (GAP) framework, with fractional investing and brokerage of 0.1 per cent of transaction value.
Zerodha, the second-largest platform with about 15 per cent of active clients, is running the service in beta on Kite. Users get up to 2,000 US companies and around 1,000 ETFs, routed through BSE-owned India INX Global Access, with fractional purchases starting at $1. The company told CNBC that a wider launch is a few weeks away.
Angel One, which has about 6.7 million active clients, has started a phased rollout to select users and plans wider availability by mid-November. It is waiving brokerage until December 2026. Upstox has also gone live, offering more than 8,000 stocks and over 2,000 ETFs through its IFSC operations.
Why the timing matters
Several forces are pushing the demand. India’s benchmark Nifty 50 is down nearly 13 per cent since January, while the S&P 500 is up more than 12 per cent. Foreign investors have pulled a record $32.5 billion out of Indian equities this year, according to NSDL data cited by CNBC. A weaker rupee is also pushing investors to hold some of their wealth in dollar assets. Zerodha’s Somnath Mukherjee pointed to long-standing demand for global companies and to India’s lack of home-grown AI champions.
RBI data show how quickly behaviour is changing. Resident Indians remitted over $321 million abroad for equity and debt investment in August, up 111 per cent from a year earlier. Investment now accounts for about 11.7 per cent of outward remittances under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), compared with 5.8 per cent a year ago. Indians are moving from spending abroad to investing abroad.
The fintech angle and the risks
For wealthtech platforms, US stocks are a new revenue line built on infrastructure they already have: KYC, UPI-linked funding and a large active user base. GIFT City brings a domestic regulatory wrapper under the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA). Brokers no longer have to rely only on offshore partners. Fractional investing from $1 removes the high share-price barrier.
Investors still face currency risk, foreign-exchange spreads, bank charges and tax rules under the India-US tax treaty, so they should look at total cost rather than brokerage alone. Market participants also note that retail outflows tend to rise exactly when the rupee is weak. Some warn that regulators could revisit how freely retail money moves overseas if participation grows quickly.
For now, the race to sell US stocks is the newest front in India’s wealthtech competition. Distribution scale may matter as much as product depth.
Sources: CNBC, CNBC-TV18 and Mint reporting; RBI and NSDL data as cited.
