Zerata doesn't want to go public. It wants to be in the room every time someone else does. On September 1st, Seabye cleared its subsidiary as a Category 1 merchant banker, licensed to run other companies' IPOs. Why now? Broking revenue fell from 3,066 crore to 2,738 in one year, after Seabye's derivatives curbs pulled retail traders out of F&O. Group revenue went flat. Lending, margin funding, asset management. Merchant banking is next. But this is not the business Zirada knows. Broking was won on technology and price. Open an account, trade, done. IPO mandates are won years earlier in relationships with promoters and CFOs. That's Kotak, Axis, Fifel and Nomura's turf. On India's eight biggest new age IPOs, Kotak's name appears on seven. The exception was Shadowfax. Zirada isn't empty handed. Millions of retail investors are distribution no one can build quickly. Its tech first name travels with founders and the pitch is pure Zerata. Low cost, no hard selling. But retail is one side of the book. Anchor investors, mutual funds and insurers set the price and Zerata has no institutional franchise. So the first mandates matter more than the fee. They're the track record everything compounds on. One analyst expects low single digits of revenue for three to five years. Not a counterweight. Zerata isn't going public. It's moved to the side of the table that decides who does.
Machine-transcribed from the published render, so acronyms may be cased as ordinary words.