Billionbrains Garage Ventures Ltd (NSE: GROWW) Q4 2026 Earnings Call dated Apr. 20, 2026
Corporate Participants:
Kunalraj Singh Chhabra — Head of Investor Relations
Lalit Keshre — WholeTime Director & CEO
Ishan Bansal — WholeTime Director & CFO
Analysts:
Supratim Datta — Analyst
Sanketh Godha — Analyst
Manish Ostwal — Analyst
Vivek Gautam — Analyst
Dipanjan Ghosh — Analyst
Abhijeet Sakhare — Analyst
Madhur Sharma — Analyst
Neeraj Toshniwal — Analyst
Samridh Sharma — Analyst
Gaurav Singhal — Analyst
Presentation:
Operator
[Technical Issues] All participant lines will be in the listen-only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the management’s remarks. Please note that this call is being recorded. Additionally, please note that this earnings call is scheduled for a duration of 45 minutes. [Operator Instructions] We will announce your name on the call and unmute your line post which you can proceed with your questions. For today’s call from the management, we have Mr. Lalit Keshre, CoFounder and CEO; Mr. Harsh Jain, CoFounder and COO; Mr. Neeraj Singh, CoFounder and CTO; Mr. Ishan Bansal, CoFounder and CFO; Mr. Lalit Bhimani, Group Head, Finance; Mr. Kunalraj Singh Chhabra, Head, Investor Relations.
I now hand the call over to Kunal. Thank you. And over to you, sir.
Kunalraj Singh Chhabra — Head of Investor Relations
Thank you, Michelle. Good evening everyone and welcome to the call. Our results and shareholder’s letter have been published on the exchanges as well as uploaded on the company’s IR website. Before we begin, I would like to remind all the attendees that some statements or comments made on the call today by the management may reflect the outlook or can be deemed as forward-looking and hence may involve certain risks and are not subject to any review. Such statements or comments are not guarantees of future performance and the actual results may differ.
With that I would like to invite Lalit for opening remarks.
Lalit Keshre — WholeTime Director & CEO
Thank you, Kunal. Hello, everyone and welcome to the earnings call. This is our third call after we became public and almost 39 — end of 39 quarters since we started. And as you know like overall in India there are maybe 70 million to 80 million maybe here, I mean give or take around these many unique investors in stocks and MF. And if you look at the active Internet population, who are transacting online and so on is in the order of 500 million, 600 million and that is also growing. So why we are telling you is because it feels like we can continue kind of working for hundreds of more quarters and continue building. And also that in every quarter you will probably hear us say the same thing and it might become repetitive whatever purpose is and how we want to kind of build well for our customers in the country.
Since this is the fourth quarter, we also thought that it would kind of be good to kind of give you kind of quick highlights of of the last financial year and then how we look forward from here, so quickly like first thing as you know like last year was a very kind of important year for us as we kind of became a public company. We also saw a lot of kind of regulatory changes in some of the — in our broking business like True to Label, F&O and so on. And I think your company kind of did well there. We launched new products namely like commodities and bonds. On bonds we had launched primary and now we are kind of launching secondaries. Both the products have done well. We scaled some of the existing products. MTF scaled really well for us. In other products be it equity, MFs, F&O, we grew our market share. We forayed into wealth management with Fisdom acquisition and this helped us launched — this helped us kind of introduce three more products on the platform which is like Fisdom, which is the bank partnership product, W which is wealth management for affluent and HNI customers on GROWW and Prime which is more for mass affluent customers on GROWW.
On AMC we partnered with SSG, of course it is subject to regulatory approvals. Our AUM grew like 2.5x in one year and yeah of course, we became public so that was another milestone. Going forward I think quite quick summary our focus will continue to be on scaling our wealth. Right? We feel that — now it’s been six months of the acquisition, Fisdom’s acquisition and now we have got a lot of kind of learnings and how to kind of look at this problem of scaling and so on. So we’ll continue kind of scaling wealth. Second is we’ll continue compounding our existing businesses, grow market share which we have been continuously doing. Right? And thirdly we see like this year the — I think that we will see the inflection point how AI will kind of start impacting a lot and we look at it in two ways. One is how we can improve the customer experience leveraging AI. And second is on the productivity side where our internal teams are kind of shipping much faster, shipping better and so on. And lastly as we keep doing like we continue finding new gaps, new products to launch finding smaller S curves. So we’ll continue doing that and yeah, that’s, that’s all.
I look forward to the questions today. Thank you.
Kunalraj Singh Chhabra — Head of Investor Relations
Thank you, Lalit. We will now begin with Q&A. Michelle, please go ahead.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you very much sir. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question is from Supratim Datta. Please unmute yourself and proceed with the question.
Supratim Datta
Yeah. Hi. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. My first question is on overall broking business. In the DRHP you had given data around how customer assets grew over a period of time. Typically people who started in somewhere around 20 to 23 saw their assets grow by 3.4x over a three-, four-year period. How has the cohorts which started maybe in ’24 or ’23, how are those tracking given the kind of market correction that we have seen and what is the kind of behavior — difference in behavior you are seeing in these cohorts which would have started in the last one or two years versus the ones which started before because they would have seen a sharper correction in the last 12 months. So if you could give us some color on that, how are you seeing customer behavior vary across different cohorts? That would be very helpful.
Secondly, coming to your wealth management business, thanks a lot Lalit for giving us some color around those businesses. But wanted to understand now that you know, GROWW has been launched, you know, for since Jan, what is the kind of feedback that you are getting from the product? How do you see that scale up maybe over a two- to three-year period? And what from the perspective of investments, how do you see, investments on the wealth side also play out over the next two years? You know that’s my second question. Lastly a few data keeping questions. One is, you used to give the affluent customer asset breakup and contribution to revenue as well. So if you could give that, that would be very helpful. How much of assets today is from affluent clients on the platform and what is their revenue contribution? Thank you.
Ishan Bansal
So let me take the first question on the broking side. I think we earlier also talked about that in last one, 1.5 year the acquisition funnel has been slightly different. Primarily like you have seen that markets are not doing so great since September ’24. Since then what we have saw that the acquisition funnel has shifted more towards mutual funds and ETFs as a products and hence the way customer actually getting introduced to the capital market has become slightly different. But their AUM gathering is probably still in line with the similar kind of way that was happening earlier. Because SIP is one of the largest mode of AUM accumulation that is happening on MF as well as on ETF also SIP is very big now.
And another thing is there is a M2M that keeps on happening across different products even like ETFs because gold and silver is a large part of it. There’s a huge MTM that people saw during February versus January people were probably significantly positive as well. But what we have seen is at a aggregate level most of these customers are still profitable with the obviously 31st March being not a best day for cut-off. But if you look at just after that most of the pain that was there in March or large part of that pain has kind of reversed and hence people are still making money and hence the inflows are still kind of not going down. But on a M2M basis there is a dip in the AUM.
Lalit Keshre
Thanks for that Ishan.
Ishan Bansal
Can you repeat the second question.
Lalit Keshre
Sorry, what was the second question?
Supratim Datta
Yeah, the second question was on the wealth management business. So even GROWW Prime has been launched since January. Wanted to understand what is your initial trends or learnings from that and how do you plan to you know scale that up over the next two years and what kind of investments would not only grow Prime but W for GROWW as well as Fisdom require over the next two to three years. Because I think in the Shareholder Letter you have called out that Fisdom should be profitable by FY ’28. So just wanted to understand that how are you looking at investments across these three platforms as well? Yeah.
Lalit Keshre
Hey, so Supratim, so I think, I think it’s bit early. It’s been two quarters now since the acquisition and all. I think we are thinking it in a kind of, we are solving it in a very nice way and so on. So I think it’s very early to comment on anything right now. A lot of things kind of, we are building.
Supratim Datta
Got it. Understood. So just Lalit one thing then on the wealth business, what has, have you seen any cross-sell between who are taking the mutual funds, broking and wealth currently? Has there been any cross-sell or is it still too early to comment there?
Lalit Keshre
Of course there is but as I said like it’s, it’s early and we are still kind of streamlining the flows and everything. It’s more, more I think the demand wise, I think from the overall potential perspective and demand perspective there is a large market. I mean I think what we are focusing more on the service levels and raising the bar of the experience and everything.
Supratim Datta
Understood, understood. And on the last third question on affluent customer assets on the platform and their share of revenue.
Ishan Bansal
Yeah, I think we’ll probably get back to you on this. I think on top of our mind.
Supratim Datta
Sure, sure. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Sanketh Godha. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question.
Sanketh Godha
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the opportunity. So my first question is on your equity options market share. Means if I you look like-to-like basis compared to previous quarter and the current quarter it seems that your market share has increased from 9.1% to 10.6%. So what exactly in your view has led to this sharp jump in the market share of 150 basis point? Is it to do with your new product launches like 915 or GROWW cloud and API has played a role? And also you can give a bit of color out of the total options trading what happens in your platform? How much is today contributed by Algo and how do you see it to play out going ahead? So that’s my first question.
And second, maybe more often data keeping, on commodity you give the, maybe indirectly the orders and the number of users. But if you can give a bit of market share also on ADTO terms, retail ADTO terms, that will be useful to understand how quickly you achieve what kind of market share. Because the number of orders indirectly gives a color but we don’t know how exactly the market share is. Those are my two questions.
Ishan Bansal
Sure. So let me take that. So on the derivative side, the equity derivative side. So actually it’s not just options, it’s a combination of future and options. The market share that we got expanded in this quarter, it is a continuation. If you look at it on a Y-o-Y basis or it is happening for us. The reason is there is a two fold reason. One, the new customer that are coming to the kind of derivatives market, there is some benefits that we are driving from some of the new initiatives that we are taking including 915. But large part of this is again coming on GROWW itself.
And the second piece is because the last quarter had a lot of volatility and we saw that our customers who used to kind of trade earlier have also started doing more and hence the absolute number of customers have significantly increased. So roughly earlier we had around 14 lakh customers on a quarterly basis transacting. This time we had around 17 lakh customers transacting, so which has actually helped us increase the volume and output was obviously in terms of market share as well. This shows that like we are retention overall is high on the platform which helps us recover whenever the customer is interested in any other product. So the customer might not be doing derivatives in last quarter but started doing derivatives in this quarter might be doing stocks or mutual fund in the last quarter. So that has actually helped us delivering a higher market share on the derivative side.
And the second on the Algo side I think we don’t have like it’s not meaningful any API or Algo today is not really meaningful in terms of any transactions. And the third I think we will start giving commodity-related ADTO because we haven’t just crossed even a year of our commodities launched. So we thought probably once we cross a year that is the time probably we’ll start delivering the market share number and so that there will be a Y-o-Y comparison etc., also available to you.
Sanketh Godha
But Ishan, any stress or any strategy you have very clearly on Algo-based trading because they meaningfully contribute to the volume growth and order growth probably? So means, means any, any outlook you have or plans you have with respect to that piece will be useful if you can bit tell softer points there. And second in the quarter — lastly, sorry, in the quarter we saw a decent jump in the employee cost. And your depreciation, is it largely related to Fisdom, which led to the increase in the employee cost and this is the new normal going ahead?
Ishan Bansal
Yeah, so let me take the first one. I think as of now we don’t have a very like strong strategy on focusing on Algo. We believe the new regulation that are still kind of getting cleaned up over a period of time will give us more clarity and we will probably jump into this market once we have full clarity on the regulatory piece, then only we’ll be able to kind of build a product which we can scale. So hence I think we are trying to kind of wait for that to happen. On the second part, you are right. On the depreciation side there is an impact primarily coming because of the Fisdom acquisition. There is a increase in depreciation that happened. On employee costs because we are investing across multiple functions including asset management and wealth side and there are initiatives on the AI side also that we are taking in GROWW where we are doing investing. So this investment typically comes in the people form for us and hence the employee cost has increased a little bit from last quarter to this quarter.
Sanketh Godha
Ishan, can you give the head count if you don’t mind?
Ishan Bansal
So today the headcount is around 1,800.
Sanketh Godha
Okay, perfect. Yeah, that’s it from my side.
Operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Manish Ostwal. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question sir.
Manish Ostwal
Thank you for the opportunity. So my question on the wealth management business. So if you take the three- to five-year view on the business. So what is the differentiating factors what GROWW will bring to the market compared to the existing models? Can you talk about that thing that will be helpful for us?
Ishan Bansal
Yeah, sure, I’ll take that. So see a couple of things that are happening is one is there is a significant change of the customer base from the wealth point of view. The new segment of users are becoming affluent in HNI. They’re coming from a very new age kind of experience. So there’s an experiential layer which is going to be different for the building the wealth business. And as Lalit was also saying, we are investing in raising the bar of experience and the service and which is what going to be a differentiator for us which comes both from the technology point of view and also on the product selection to an advisory role point of view. So we’ll continue building on this which is what takes us time to get the nail the right solution for people and then keep on scaling that from there.
Manish Ostwal
Secondly sir, for my see last two years we have seen that there’s a hardly any return to the investor and now the things are turning around. So two question, one is the active customer base participation at industry level as well as the in your business should increase if the trend sustain in times to come. That’s the first thing. Second is in terms of cost to serve and cost to grow, both cost compared to revenue growth, what pace we can assume expenditure growth versus let’s say 20% revenue growth, what kind of growth we should model in in terms of overall cost to grow and cost of maintenance basically?
Ishan Bansal
Let me take that. So on the new users coming to industry I think we have seen the down cycle. I think things are looking better than earlier. But again we are wary of a lot of the macroeconomic factors that are impacting the markets including tariffs and including like largely FIIs being negative from the market has also impacted significantly the way market would have grown otherwise. I think we are waiting for that kind of clear signal to be there where people have started or FIIs have started putting money in India. I think that can be a good indicator to say that now things are on the positive cycle. But as of now it doesn’t look like it’s obvious. We might need to wait for a few more quarters to say that we are in the next cycle of growth. But definitely we are away from the bottom yet as of now.
On the second side on the cost to serve as well as cost to grow. So the cost to serve the way we look at is largely a tech-related cost. So they are obviously as the revenue per transaction grows, our cost to serve actually goes down. But at the same time with AI coming in, all of our tech-related AI costs will come as a part of cost to serve. There might be a slight bit of increase but we don’t see that increase to be like proportional to the revenue. So as a percentage we expect that it to be kind of slightly lower. But obviously there will be absolute basis increases that keep on happening. On the cost to grow largely the spend has been more or less consistent on an absolute basis. So if you look at between last year and this year we would have spent very similar to INR450 crores to INR500 crores is kind a spend and we will keep on increasing this a little bit, but it’s not going to be again linear with terms of revenue. It will be more to kind of build new brands. So W coming in might have some spends attached to it. 915 coming in might have some spends attached to it but it’ll always be again likely be lower than the growth in the revenue.
Manish Ostwal
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Vivek Gautam. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your questions.
Vivek Gautam
Yes, sir. Please proceed. Yeah, I just wanted to understand about the opportunity size and the expected process you can have and more importantly about the differentiator for us versus the competition which is helping us in growth. And any concern on the SEBI and governments would like to sort of curb the speculation [Indecipherable] options, especially for the retail traders who are major strength of our clients. How do we mitigate? Thank you.
Ishan Bansal
Yeah, so I’ll take that. So from an opportunity point of view, so we look forward like we’ll continue compounding on our core business where there are new investors coming in and in the opening statement we spoke about the penetration which is possible in the country and we will continue trying to gain a larger and larger market share. So that builds a one dimensional opportunity where there are new investors coming in and they are participating in various products that we have. The other dimension is launching new products and services for some of the segment of the users. Like wealth is one of them. 915 is another one. So we are able to make more products available for a particular segment of users. So these all creates opportunities for future.
Sorry, what was your second question?
Vivek Gautam
Second question was regarding the differentiators for us.
Ishan Bansal
So we see, we believe that you know our — so we continue investing in building an experience for user which is, which converts into a higher retention for us because people, the users who come in on our platform, they stay longer, they are able to participate in different products in different market scenarios with their different preferences and with the technology investment that we do we are able to create some differential experiences in terms of their activation in terms of their engagement on the product. So this will continue to be our differentiator and we’ll continue investing in that.
Vivek Gautam
The last was about the regulation from the government side trying to curb the speculation, again market and start with 90% of the customers losing money and gaming application, one fine day being banned all of a sudden. So what are the steps we are taking to mitigate?
Ishan Bansal
So we have been operating in a regulated space for the last like since we started. So we do participate with our regulators on very regular basis on all the concerns that they have. Their concerns are pretty much what our concerns are like. If all of us are trying to work in the favor of investors, ultimately we want to create wealth for our customers. So anything that comes up, we’ll participate with them and we’ll try to solve it in industry level.
Vivek Gautam
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Dipanjan Ghosh. Please unmute yourself and proceed with the question.
Dipanjan Ghosh
Hi, good evening. Hope I’m audible.
Operator
Yes sir. Please proceed.
Dipanjan Ghosh
Yeah, hi. So the first question was in terms of the MTF book, obviously, I mean for you the MTF book has been on a writing trajectory. Now what I wanted to understand is if you look at the customers who are taking the MTF proposition on your platform, have you done any study to understand, I mean are these new to MTF customers or these are customers who have been onboarded once you started the MTF journey and they are kind of acquainted with the product task or this would be like existing customers who were probably having this product through a competitor platform and now that you are also offering the product they have kind of shifted the platform? Some color on that would be useful.
The second question is on the platform ARPU, I mean that is almost back to pre November ’24 levels. So again, I mean is there any work that you have done to understand? Is it like weaker customers who got weeded out of the platform or went into dormancy? Or is it you guys are acquiring high quality new customers or maybe the existing customers just got acclimatized to the new regime, whether it’s incremental taxation or incremental regulations? And finally one data keeping question. If you can give the average MTF book for the quarter that will be useful.
Ishan Bansal
Let me take that. On MTF, I think there is no study as such that we have done but our understanding is that MTF for us is not an acquisition product. It is mostly our existing customers are using MTF. Earlier they might be doing intraday instead of MTF is one use case where customers now are holding onto their positions for longer is one big use case. And second thing, it’s very difficult for us to actually even figure it out that if the customer were doing MTF outside or doing it in house. But what we know is that most of our customers are unique to us and they only transact with us. And hence the likelihood of the customers doing MTF somewhere else and doing rest of the things here is unlikely, especially on the cash segment side.
The second question, second part of the — I think we will figure out on the average if we want to disclose and we’ll come back to you on that part. I forgot the second question was on the ARPU. So ARPU was actually a more complicated reason why where we are today. So it’s a mix of the penetration of F&O going down which led to actually the ARPU overall at a platform level going down. But at the same time with MTF coming in, commodities coming in, the ARPU actually went up. So it’s a combination of these two factors which has helped us kind of reach to the pre November numbers. It is not because the — again people have started trading or F&O has again started penetrating more. The penetration of F&O is still in like 10% around range which used to be like 18odd percent before November.
Dipanjan Ghosh
Hey thanks, Ishan. Just one small follow up. I mean you can disclose the average MTF for the quarter later but I mean in terms of the unwinding that the industry has seen in March, I mean would you be in line with it? You would have done fare better, any qualitative color?
Ishan Bansal
So we also saw a peak somewhere in between I think probably Feb end was or I don’t remember actually Jan end or Feb end, we actually peaked and then there was a dip and this number is after the dip. So the average will be probably closer to this or slightly higher than this also is possible. But obviously things are again, April is better than March from a market perspective as well.
Dipanjan Ghosh
Got it, Ishaan and the team and all the best.
Ishan Bansal
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Abhijeet Sakhare. Please unmute yourself and proceed with the question.
Abhijeet Sakhare
Hey. Hi. Hello, everyone. My first question is like a broad question on the platform. Now it’s kind of, you guys are fairly large and in some ways a bit more mature. Now do you see any demand for services like stock advisory or like recommendations at least from the more mature set of customers and whether that’s really the case and if yes, then how are you kind of ensuring that you continue to retain some of those mature customers on the platform? The second question is on the GROWW Prime if you can indicate when do you plan to kind of extend it to existing customers? And I have a couple of data questions after that. Thank you.
Ishan Bansal
So let me take this, Abhijeet. So you are — so this is a good thing like. So I think we have seen this demand for long now like stock advisory, MF advisory. It’s been quite — this probably one of the highest asked question on our in our voice of customer and we have been kind of thinking about it. We will launch it when the timing is right, when we have the right solution and so on. The second one Prime again as so our philosophy has always been like kind of craft the product which is like the delta between our solution and what exists should be like should be a huge delta. Right? And Prime we have been kind of devising the product for kind of some time now. It is available to some customers and we feel that it will be in a position for existing customers. Again we don’t want to give the timeline but we have some kind we are optimist about — we are optimistic about the creation of a product that our customers would love.
Abhijeet Sakhare
Got it. Okay. And a couple of data questions. If you could share what was the share of MTF in the 4Q cash ADTO. If you could share that number. And then on the cost to operate there was a comment in the letter on some risk related costs. So if you could kind of explain that. And then also like how do we think about the entire like cost to operate growth for the next year as well.
Ishan Bansal
So I think we’ll get back to you on the percentage. My guess is it is still between 5% to 10% it hasn’t significantly changed but the exact number will come back to you. And the second part, the cost to operate like you said there is a risk related cost which again because of the volatility that we saw both on the commodity side and then on the equity side. So Feb was more on commodity side when gold and silver kind of significantly moved in a day or two and there was square off related kind of you can say negative balances that people went in and which we kind of accounted for in adjusted — in cost to operate. And the second piece happened during the March time when Iran war started and there was significant volatility in some of the stocks and where in MTF we actually accounted some of the negative balances and which we have kind of put it into our P&L as cost to operate. Going forward with the exception of these risk related cost, I think you can assume that this will grow in Q1 with the appraisal cycle there will be a onetime kind of increase. And after that we expect it to be kind of more or less stable for the rest of the year.
Abhijeet Sakhare
Okay. Thank you, Ishan. Thank you, Lalit.
Operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Madhur Sharma. Please unmute yourself and proceed.
Madhur Sharma
Sir, thank you for taking my question. So first on cost to operate, Ishan, do you mean it will remain stable as percentage of revenue?
Ishan Bansal
No sir, in absolute it will increase in the Q1 because of the appraisals and after that in absolute it will remain stable. And all of this which I am saying is primarily talking about GROWW as a platform. The AMC business and the Fisdom business will still have more investments in terms of hiring as well which will increase the cost for that business. But for the GROWW as a platform, these costs will become stable after Q1.
Madhur Sharma
Right. Right. Understood. Thank you. Second, so Lalit mentioned about how we are investing in AI and how it is going to improve customer experience as well as backend. So Lalit, can you highlight few initiatives, few key initiatives that we are implementing in near term?
Lalit Keshre
So Madhu, so seen from productivity side I think the entire SDLC which is Software Development Life Cycle AI is kind of changing that completely. Right. Then from the overall company operations perspective and then on the customer experience side, our customer support for example. And then we also launch GR1 which is like a copilot customer can research and all. So there are a bunch of places like this and all these are like — internally we haven’t disclosed the percentage of code and percentage of this thing kind of done by AI. But we are seeing a meaningful kind of difference in our kind of way of working.
Madhur Sharma
Okay. Okay. So do you expect the number of engineers, basically people who are involved in coding to go down in coming years in a meaningful way?
Lalit Keshre
So Madhu, the way we look at it is see we are in a journey where we are building lot of things. So currently how we think it is, with the same strength, can we ship more, can we ship faster and can we ship higher quality? Right. So if you look at the trajectory also of last four years or so. Right. Number of products that we have launched in last four years is like I think we have, we had like I think three, four products four years back and now we have like 12 products and still launching more and so on. Right?
Madhur Sharma
Yeah.
Ishan Bansal
We have been able to do all this with the strength, more or less similar kind of strength. Right. So, so this is how kind of we like to see where with the existing strength we can launch a lot of new products. So all the new products that we launch, we don’t need to kind of, we, we carve out a team from within kind of our existing folks.
Madhur Sharma
Understood, Understood. Thank you. And lastly, data keeping question. So Ishan, if you can tell me the revenue from Fisdom and AMC business.
Ishan Bansal
Lalit, you have top of your mind. Sorry, I don’t remember.
Madhur Sharma
Ah, no worries, no worries. I’ll reach out to Kunal for that. Thank you. That was all from my side.
Operator
Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Neeraj Toshniwal. Please unmute yourself and proceed with your question.
Neeraj Toshniwal
Yeah. Hi, I’m audible.
Operator
Yes sir.
Neeraj Toshniwal
So with cost to serve and cost to grow kind of growing slower than the revenue growth run rate and cost to operate as you’re mentioning would kind of stabilize. So how should one think about margins going forward? What is the margin run rate or exit margin you’re looking at for the next year?
Ishan Bansal
So it’s I think again correlated with the revenue growth. I think revenue growth has lot of lever attached to it. So hence it’s very difficult for us to put a number to the revenue growth. We keep on saying that if our revenue grows beyond let’s say 15%, then probably the margin will keep on expanding. If it grows 30%, probably the expansion will be more. If it grows slightly lower, then the margin will not expand. So like that is like the formula. But it’s difficult to predict how much will be the real revenue growth in the next year.
Neeraj Toshniwal
Okay, got it. And on the, if we want to carve out the cost of acquisition like the number we gave in last letter, but I think we have not given this time how much was the cost of acquisition.
Ishan Bansal
So cost to grow is largely cost to acquisition. So it will be more or less the same number. It hasn’t — quarterly also it hasn’t significantly changed. What we have learned is that again, marketing cost is more or less consistent, at least on an annual basis there is a little bit of volatility because of IPL, but it has become largely a fixed number for us.
Neeraj Toshniwal
So shall we see more — because of IPL, shall we see because of more advertisement and all a little higher spends in Q1 or?
Ishan Bansal
Q1 is generally slightly higher. But in last year I think we were conservative. I think this year we’ll probably do slightly more than the last year.
Neeraj Toshniwal
Okay, got it. And one more question on the — I mean the rational for changing the calculation of this market share, if I think my understanding that exchange anyways, does buy and sell automated — the overall trade as one. The count is one. So I think the industry also kind of reports like that only, your competition also. Just wanted some sense why we have kind of, changed the way we have shown the market share.
Ishan Bansal
So there are multiple reasons. One of the big reason is that internally this is how we look at it. And we feel that we should be more transparent in showing what we look at. And that is how is the possibility also right. If you look at tomorrow how much market share we can have is a — is what we want to kind of target. Not really how will it look like from a calculation perspective. We think this is a better assessment of market share than what we were doing earlier. And hence we have kind of moved to this.
Neeraj Toshniwal
Got it. That is very helpful. Thank you and all the best.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Samridh Sharma. Please unmute yourself and proceed, sir.
Samridh Sharma
Good evening, everyone. I hope I’m audible. Just one question from my side. So what is the company’s thoughts on the emergence of these new age fee only brokers? And essentially how do you see the market landscape shifting according to that?
Ishan Bansal
Lalit, you want to take it?
Lalit Keshre
Sorry, Samridh you mean new age zero fee or low fee — fixed fee?
Samridh Sharma
Fee only brokers.
Lalit Keshre
Zero fee?
Samridh Sharma
Fee ny only?
Lalit Keshre
Fee only. So I think we — see currently our thought process is like let’s say if we don’t talk about competitors, if we just think from the value perspective that we provide to the customer, our philosophy is right. Our philosophy is that give more value to customer than you charge. And we feel that it’s also fair for customers like they are paying on per transaction basis and so on. So — and we also see that customers are kind of happy with that. So we haven’t kind of thought about that.
Samridh Sharma
Do you see any significant move in the way the industry works because of the emergence of such players?
Lalit Keshre
We’ll keep a watch Samridh, but as of now we don’t see that.
Samridh Sharma
Fair enough. Thank you.
Lalit Keshre
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll take the last question for today from Raghav Maheshwari. Please unmute yourself and proceed, sir. Mr. Maheshwari, please proceed, sir. I’m sorry sir, you are inaudible. As there was no response, we’ll take the last question from Gaurav Singhal. Please unmute yourself and proceed.
Gaurav Singhal
Thanks for taking my question and thanks for taking our time. Just a few questions. So one is for the industry we have seen the NSE active clients kind of plateauing out at around 50 million for a while now and for GROWW obviously the client growth has been quite good because of market share gain. But then eventually of course the industry needs to grow. So the analogy you drew in your opening remarks was that there are 500 million, 600 million people who who shop actively online. So to get this 50 million industry number, let’s say 100 million over time, what gives you that confidence that you know that the industry can keep expanding rapidly as it did in the last five years? That was the first question.
Secondly, are we hitting any open interest limit on these like single script products like SENSEX Options or some of the other products because of our scale. And thirdly, what’s our settlement cycle right now in terms of repatriating cash balances, the client cash balances back to their bank accounts. And what is the thinking of the regulators on reducing or increasing this time period which would obviously impact our interest income. Thank you.
Ishan Bansal
So let me take this. So the growth rate of this industry is actually driven a lot based on which kind of market we are in. Right. If you look at in last one, 1.5 year we have been in the kind of more volatile market. But before that we were in a like a bull run. And that was the time when large part of the customer base kind of grew. And this keeps on happening. And if you look at in the last 20 years history of stock market also, the growth rate typically comes largely, the industry growth rate typically comes in those bull runs and then it’s like stabilize a bit and then again it happens. Right. So when will it happen will depend on when will the next bull run bull run comes. And that is the time when market will expand. And typically that is that time the expansion is like very, very high. So it’s not like 5%, 10%. The growth rates are typically significantly higher. But if you look at a longer frame, the industry is growing like a 10% to 15% CAGR.
On the on the questions on settlement, I think that I remember now is basically it is on the customer demand. So there are customer have today broadly three options. They can do bill to bill settlement, they can do monthly settlement or they can do quarterly settlement. Quarterly settlement today is like an obligation that you can’t go beyond that. And we do whatever as customer has chosen. And for quarterly settlement it is done on the first month of the quarter and monthly settlement done on the first week of the month. And the bill to bill settlement is as and when the bill is posted and next year you do the settlement when the actual settlement happens from the exchange side as well.
Sorry, I forgot the second question that you asked.
Gaurav Singhal
So this settlement cycle, the limit which is quarter now this seems to be keep — has kept going down. So what is the regulator’s thinking on this? Does it keep going down?
Ishan Bansal
So it has been quarterly since last 10 years now and I think it is again a choice. We haven’t seen a customer being choosing bill to bill settlement significantly more than monthly or quarterly. Actually quarterly is probably what most customer wants because it’s a lot more convenient if we do a quarterly settlement. Whenever the quarterly settlement happens, a lot of customers actually get surprised at why their money was refunded and so on. And it becomes inconvenience for a lot of customers. We don’t look at it less from our income perspective, but think it more from what customer wants and provide them in a more seamless and more trustful way and do it. And if you look at we give option of instant withdrawals where in the day also if you want to take money out, you can withdraw and the money will come to your bank account within few seconds.
Gaurav Singhal
And just lastly was if you’re hitting any limits on these, like, single script option, open interest here.
Ishan Bansal
No. So we talked about it last quarter also. So on average, we are like less than half of it on the limit side. And in the last quarter, we haven’t hit that limit at all for any day or any script.
Gaurav Singhal
All right, thank you.
Operator
Thank you. As that was the last question for today, I now hand over the conference back to Kunal for closing comments. Thank you. And over to you.
Kunalraj Singh Chhabra
Thank you everyone, for joining the call today. And feel free to reach out to us for any questions or clarifications. Have a good week.
Lalit Keshre
Thank you.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]