The company behind every trade in India is going public

**Akshara** (0:04)
In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about India's biggest ever IPO, and then we'll talk about whether Indian farms get fertilizers on time.
Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Ziruda, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Friday, 19th June. Coming to the first story. So today, we're going to talk about a company that's critical to our business at Ziruda and to every other broker in India. It's because of them that we exist, as does the ecosystem we're part of. This is the national stock exchange, NSC. They filed their IPO papers this week, and from the size it's expected to reach, at nearly Rs 30,000 crore, it may well become the biggest IPO India has ever seen. And they're going for a pure offer for sale. That is, NSC itself is not raising any money, its existing shareholders are cashing out, and their offer document is a gold mine. Even to us, as people who sit in the middle of Indian financial markets every single day, there were things we hadn't fully thought about before. Let's dive in. So when you buy a stock on Zerodha, you also pick an exchange to route your order to, NSC or BSE. And several entities come together to make your trade successful. The exchange, a clearing corporation, a depository. But the exchange lies at the heart of it, and it's the venue where the actual trade happens. Here, your buy order is matched with a sell order, and the transaction is executed. Now, Zerodha charges you a brokerage to get your trade to NSC, and in turn, NSC charges Zerodha a fee for routing trades through its platform. A few years ago, Indian capital markets barely registered in global financial conversations. Most Indian households kept their savings in fixed deposits and gold, and the stock market was something most people had no real relationship with. Over the last decade or so, though, that changed rapidly and dramatically.
India is now the fourth largest equity market in the world by market capitalization. As of March 2026, nearly 13 crore Indians are registered as investors on NSC. Just two years ago, that number was just over 9 crore. That is, India added about 4 crore new investors in just two years. In FY26, 108 companies listed on NSC's main board, the highest number in several years. More than rupees 20 lakh crore was mobilized through its platform in a single year across equities, debt, mutual funds, and infrastructure instruments. And NSC, at the center of all this, earns from every piece of activity flowing through. So in FY26, NSC revenues from its operations came to about rupees 16,600 crore. About rupees 13,000 crore of that, roughly 79% came from the transaction charges NSC collects every time a trade goes through its platform. And of that, cash equities generated about rupees 1,500 crore, while equity futures generated about rupees 1,500 crore. But the mega earner was equity options, which singularly generated rupees 10,000 crore, or 60% of NSC's total revenue. Now, much of that was the result of a single instrument, the Nifty 50 weekly options contract. From almost nothing a decade ago, it's now become the beating heart of the largest financial market institution in India.
The remainder, 21% of NSC's revenue comes from four places. One, there are data connectivity charges, which trading firms and institutions pay for a direct fast connection to NSC's matching engine. Large firms co-locate their servers inside NSC's data center, so their orders arrive microseconds ahead of everyone else. And the fees for that service can be significant, bringing about ₹1100 crore into its coffers. And then, there are data feed and terminal services. Everyone, from Bloomberg to trading platforms to analytics providers, all pay NSC to access real-time prices. And this makes up another ₹470 crore. It also made about ₹350 crore from listing services, which is the annual fee from listed companies plus IPO processing fees. And finally, there's index licensing, when fund managers pay to use the nifty name in their products, earning it about ₹150 crore. If anything, this market is underdeveloped. There's ₹8 lakh crore sitting in passive funds in India tracking nifty indices, and NSC earns only ₹150 crore from licensing all of it. Now let's compare it to global exchanges. While Indian exchanges earn the overwhelming majority of their revenue from transaction charges, global exchanges operate very differently. Nasdaq, for instance, has built a large data and technology business, and a significant portion of its revenue now comes from data subscriptions, analytics, and index licensing, all of which is agnostic to how active markets are on any given day.