First Global

The human touch
First Global is one of the largest brokerage houses with trading membership of BSE and NSE. The basic competitive advantage the company has is its research department which comprises 20 analysts. The company is also India’s only international rated firm, by the likes of Asiamoney. It has a membership of the London Stock Exchange and has offices in the UK and New York. The company is at an advanced stage of acquiring Nasdaq membership.

Recently, the company started its retail brokerage arm called efirstglobal.co.in. With the existing countrywide network, the company aims to become a brokerage house of choice for individual investors, just as it already is for insitutional investors.

Opines Shankar Sharma, director, on the fate of traditional brokers, “ E-trading has to co-exist in a very substantial way along side the main channel of broking which is the telephone market. We don’t expect the US experience to be replicated because India is typically a human-contact, human-touch country. This is not a business in which you sit in a room and trade. You need to talk and understand how the market is doing before trading . All this, the Net can’t deliver.

“Ultimately, for good or bad, you need a voice on the telephone to toss around these ideas. That is really how the business works. That is also an exit culture to a large extent. You can’t replace the human interaction in a completely non-human way.”