Zerodha rival Groww asks users to cease buying US stocks through platform

Groww asks users to halt buying US Stocks

Stock broking and financial services player Groww on January 23 asked some of its users to stop buying more US stocks through the platform by the end of February.

"Please note that fresh funding of USD balance and buying of US Stocks will be discontinued from 27th of February," Groww said in an email sent out to its users.

To be sure, Groww stopped providing the option to invest in US stocks for new users almost one year ago. The platform has around 1,500 - 2,000 users who continue to hold US stocks through the platform.

"If you don't want to sell your US Stock holdings, we will be happy to support you in migrating to another platform or with withdrawals for an extended period," the firm told its users.

Industry sources told Moneycontrol that the firm stopped onboarding users to invest and trade in US Stocks due to complications within the remittance process and high Tax Collected at Source (TCS) of 20 percent on investments of more than Rs 7 lakh in foreign stocks or mutual funds.

Earlier on January 23, several clients of the firm took to X, formerly Twitter, to highlight that they were unable to log into 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 log in from the phone app as well as a web browser. Most clients saw the message: "Oops! Something went wrong".

Last year, Groww surpassed Zerodha to become India's leading brokerage in terms of number of active investors.

According to NSE, Bengaluru-based Groww has 6.63 million active investors while Zerodha has 6.48 million at the end of September 2023. In March 2021, Zerodha had 3.4 million customers, whereas Groww had 0.78 million.