Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath on Fintech Regulation

In a fifteen-year retrospective, Kamath reports that risks he had been flagging since 2021 finally materialised: an increase in securities transaction tax on options, the removal of exchange transaction-charge rebates, a reduction in weekly expiries, and a broad decline in market activity hit the firm together, contributing to an approximately forty-percent drop in broking revenues for the year.

The regulatory tightening he describes — STT on options, fewer weekly expiries, the end of exchange rebates — represents a coordinated policy push to cool speculative retail derivatives trading in India, and Zerodha's disclosure that it absorbed a material revenue drop is itself a window into how exposed discount brokers are to incremental changes in the market microstructure regime.

Kamath sits on the SEBI Secondary Market Advisory Committee and the Market Data Advisory Committee, positions that put a bootstrapped founder inside the regulatory conversation around Indian markets and signal the firm's standing with the supervisor despite its unconventional funding path.