Groww glitch: Clients demand compensation as technical issue mars trading

The badla charges were never pre-fixed. You had to negotiate interest rates in a special one hour badla session on the next day of the expiry where lenders would haggle with borrowers over interest rates

Several clients of online trading firm Groww on January 23 took to X, formerly Twitter, to highlight that they were unable to login to their accounts and carry out trades, resulting in losses. While they demanded compensation, Groww's X account responded that the team was resolving a technical issue.

As per the X posts, users were not able to login from the phone app as well as web browser. Most clients saw the message: "Oops! Something went wrong".

One user wrote: "I'm trying to login into my account from last 30min, but it's showing error. I tried uninstalling and installing app, clearly cache. I also tried login in from chrome but still I'm unable to login."

Groww responded: "We apologise for the inconvenience. Our team is addressing a technical issue and working to resolve it promptly. Your patience is highly appreciated, and we'll be back to normal operations shortly. Thank you for your understanding."

Around 11:30 am, the company replied to users that the issue had been resolved. Moneycontrol has reached out to the Groww team and an official response on what exactly went wrong is awaited.

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In October 2023, Groww surpassed Zerodha to become India's leading brokerage in terms of number of active investors. As of latest data, Groww has 76 lakh active clients while Zerodha has 67.3 lakh.

Before that, the online stock broking firm had also received Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) approval to launch its first index fund, Groww Nifty Total Markets Index Fund through a new fund offering (NFO).

F&O snapshot

India's derivatives volumes have grown multifold in the post-COVID era. In a report titled Gamification of Indian Equities, Axis Mutual Fund had highlighted that derivatives volumes account for 5-15x of cash market volumes in most countries, while in India it is more than 400x higher.

A number of reasons have contributed to this boom, especially change in contract structure, leverage combined with the ease of client onboarding and interface of the new generation trading apps.