I feel lot of points there have been made many times here and it’s high time Dhan does something about UI which the other person has noted and improvement needed on other problems pointed in the post.
Hi @ValueInvestor0 Feedback is noted, yes we have been simplifying experience - started with app and web, and many more are in works including a full redo of the Options Trading experience.
Hello @PravinJ I know you guys have spent a lot of time and resources building the UI of both web and app. Just curious, is it possible to redo the design from the ground up?
Make me the beta tester for your new app, I will personally test out everything and give you feedbacks. Not claiming that I know any better than your team, but have gained significant experience from all these years of trading on major platforms.
Firstly thank you for the detailed note, appreciate the same and let me our perspective on this (I’m part of the Dhan team).
On Onboarding Process - You joined us pretty early in Jan 2022, from that time till now we have also improved a lot of the onboarding process. While you have given good feedback on this, would still like to state that it is much simpler that ever, but takes more time than those days when you joined. Now stock trading platforms have to wait for exchanges and depositories to verify the KYC details and then share their approval with us before we communicate to our users that they are ready to trade.
Experience over years - Yes, earlier we had an third party OMS RMS system, from we moved to our own in-house transaction processing system DEXT by November 2022. We have improved a lot (more work in progress), much reliable than ever and also process > 90% of all our orders in under 25 ms. The industry standard averages for end to end executions are usually between 100 to 150 ms.
About the Good Stuff…
Yes, we have spent a lot of time on the things that you have mentioned here - largely OMS (via DEXT) and.
Charts including execution via our charts, we work closely with TradingView and have introduced features for scalpers, option traders.
ScanX is in its early days, we launched recently and more & meaningful stuff is coming there - more inclined and aligned for investors, short term traders and market trackers for now. Dhan and Options Trader have tons of insights, almost everything there is real-time.
Options Trader - we tried to work with some of the popular ones in the market, however they didn’t want to work with us so we had to built our own. There is a major update to this planned in 2025 - both in terms of capabilities and simplification of features and user experience.
IPOs - Thanks, we recently included HNI mode as well., and many users use us for SME IPOs.
MTF - Yes, it is favourite of many traders on Dhan. We had paused it in between for market volatility and received severe backlash from our users about this. Now all good, and we also increased the coverage of stocks.
No charges for Investors - yes, possibly it is only Dhan and one more (you know who) that keeps investing fully free today. Including the one who noticed and many don’t is - Zero AMC or annual / platform fees. It is absolutely zero, and on top of it only platform with Zero fees for smallcase. For trading in F&O - we matched with the industry standards.
Mutual Funds on Dhan is new, we are making many updates here to bring what you have mentioned. But before we get there we want to move our payments systems to UPI mandates, and are also working towards introducing MF in Demat format which is an heavily demanded feature by our traders.
Yes - Thanks for noticing this. We don’t charge any charges for any payment modes, including the one-tap ICICI Bank. Yes, also were the first ones to introduced instant withdrawals as well.
Now going to the bad and ugly ones - which I am sure means a lot of work of us to do, so I will accept that first and then go ahead.
While we are on this, just want to clarify a bit here…
We prefer to build all things in-house with product, design and technology. Today almost 90% (or even more) of all our tech in built inhouse from scratch (including our own trading system DEXT) and we possibly are the only platform with this approach. Traditionally all brokers have been system integrators - which means take multiple vendor platforms and stitch them together.
Not an excuse honestly because customer’s demand and feedback are for real - it takes a bit more longer for us to built things than we could have done via getting third party platforms.
Some of our competitors have been in the industry for decades - we are still early, so I agree we have lots to catch-up with.
Regarding where we have to work from the above post…
Login - yes, we have a bit stricter here with our own OTP / QR scans. We have this request from a few systematic traders and algo traders who are using our APIs and we are working for this use-case.
Yes, nearly ~85% of all users who come to Dhan are ones who have moved / migrated from other platforms to us. As a result, we have also observed that Dhan doesn’t seem easy for those who are new to the markets. To put in numbers - more than 750,000 traders and investors moved from other platforms to Dhan; So I agree that we have missed the bus for beginners and we will have to cater to beginners in some other way (figuring out)
For TradingView charts, they do not extend the pinescript library to us, so we are restricted here. On charts adjustments, yes - it is 3 or 4 scripts every month where underlying ISIN changes and the charts don’t reflect all time-frames for that. It’s something we have reduced and a very rare, as I mentioned 3 or 4 times in a month. Btw, if you are a Custom Pinescript person (which is a bit advance user), would suggest you try Webhooks as an order type. Its fav for many.
On how things are loaded on web & app - well it is simple if you notice here, everytime you login we load the data fresh, which is not cached over update. So the first render is pretty visible. We will have to restructure this - noted, yes.
F&O platforms are getting an update, it is in works.
ScanX - yes, we have some work to do here I agree and this is happening. I would say in 4-6 months from now ScanX will be in very different form and shape, not just in data but also features, capabilities and market insights + intelligence.
Mutual Funds - yes, it cannot be pledged because the units are not in demat format. Coming very soon, and post that we will also introduce SWP, STP and more advance capabilities. On it being on web, it comes from my past experience - I earlier built a very large MF investment platform, only to see that web contributed < 1% of all orders. We are making more trader centric, and app is way forward for multiple use-cases
Feature Deployments - We follow ship as the feature gets ready since we have independent teams, and it is easier for us to put out a feature, test adoption, fine-tune it and make it available over rest of them. If we aren’t following this way, then our overall speed of shipping things will be slower.
Backoffice - Noted, and we are few weeks away from introducing an all new backoffice called Journal. We have benchmarked our reports with many, and now are looking forward to fill up this gap soon.
Customer Care - We have scaled this up and are doing more here as we speak. More updates here, we will make things happen.
Newer products like Bonds are in the works.
Designs and simplification of platform - across all of them is in works for Dhan, Options Trader and ScanX.
Slow implementation of features - as mentioned above, we have lots to catch up here and also the specific feedback on backoffice is in the works with Journal, and MF Pledge will be solved with MF units in Demat format.
Dhan for Beginners perspective, we are doing few things here. That said, I mentioned that Dhan now has more folks who know the markets v/s new, our platforms are more aligned towards them, 85% of users are in this. It takes time for the first time users to get started on Dhan, if you know markets then it is easier.
APIs - we introduced v2 recently and are moving all users to new platform. Just updated the APIs, docs, and we have uploaded more videos on our YT channel.
Once again, thanks for this detailed note and appreciate the time you have taken to share this. Lots more coming from our end, and lots more for us to do as well.
Even I am up for this. I feel I am good at finding mistakes in other’s work
This helps in better product development and reduces bugs after release.
I am even looking for jobs right now but the fact that a full time job in Dhan would be based of Mumbai or Bangalore, it would be hard for me to manage the living expenses there.
Good progress and really appreciate. One small request for MF department that it is good to add UPI mandate for autopay, but kindly do not removal autopay via netbanking or debit card. Thank you team Dhan
and really appreciate. One small request for MF department that it is good to add UPI mandate for autopay, but kindly do not removal autopay via netbanking or debit card. Thank you team Dhan