Traders Want an Edge, Not Just Cheap Trades. Execution Is India's New Broker Battleground

HT Syndication
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 31: For years, India's active traders picked a broker on one number, the price of a trade. That question is now answered. Flat per-order pricing sits on nearly every serious platform, and for the most active traders, cheap brokerage no longer sets anyone apart. What traders want next is harder to put on a pricing page: an edge. And more and more, that edge isn't decided by what a trade costs, but by how well it's executed.
Brokerage has been commoditised. Execution has not.
For most of the last decade, the competitive story in Indian broking was about cost. The move from percentage-based commissions to a flat fee per order reshaped the industry and made the discount broker the default choice for active traders.
What isn't commoditised is what happens after the trader taps the order button. For an intraday options trader placing dozens of orders a day, or a scalper working a Nifty expiry where prices can move 50 to 100 points in minutes, the outcome is decided in the fractions of a second. Slippage, order latency, platform stability at peak load, matter a lot. This is the emerging battleground: not the cost of a trade, but the reliability and speed of it.
A case study in the shift
One of the platforms built explicitly around this thesis is SAHI, the Bengaluru broker registered with SEBI as Aaritya Broking Private Limited. Rather than competing on price alone, which is set at a flat Rs 10 per F&O order, SAHI has also published performance data more common to infrastructure companies than to retail brokers. The broker reports a P95 (95th percentile) order latency of 6.61 milliseconds, measured across more than nine million real orders, and makes the underlying data public on a live execution dashboard. It also states that it has reported no technical glitches to the exchange since December 2025, a period that spans several high-volume expiry sessions.
The design decision behind those figures is unusual for a startup broker: SAHI built its charting engine and order management system in-house rather than licensing a third-party platform, so analysis and execution run on the same stack.
On top of the fast order execution, placing orders, stop-loss (SL) levels, and take-profit (TP) levels are another highlight of SAHI, as they can be auto-set or placed directly on the chart.
SAHI is one of the industry pioneers of single-screen trading on mobile. This allows zero page switch lag between reading a signal and acting on it. SAHI has zero brokerage for the first 30 days. The broker charges a flat Rs. 10 per executed order after the free period. The same pricing is available across the discount segment, and positions the in-house tool layer, not the price, as its point of difference.

You also get auto SL/TP, trailing stop loss, P&L Protect, and a host of other AI indicators and drawing tools, without any additional cost, that can help you become a better and more disciplined trader.
"Discount brokerage solved the cost problem, and that was important. But the cost is settled now. The traders who last are the ones who lose the fewest trades to friction: a fill that arrives late, a platform that stutters at the open, a signal that sits one screen away from the order. That is an engineering problem, and it is where the next round of competition will be decided."
-- Dale Vaz, Co-founder and CEO, Sahi (former Chief Technology Officer, Swiggy)
The broader market context supports the argument. The platforms that help traders lose fewer trades to friction are addressing a need that pricing alone cannot. Whether execution quality becomes the industry's primary axis of competition will depend on how many brokers are willing to invest in the infrastructure it requires. As the market matures, the shift in focus from what a trade costs to how well it is executed may be overdue.
About Sahi
Sahi is a technology-first trading platform operated by Aaritya Broking Private Limited, registered with SEBI (INZ000317632) and a member of the NSE and BSE, with depository services through CDSL. Sahi's research advisory is SEBI-Registered (INH000022172). Founded in 2023 by Dale Vaz and Manish Jain and headquartered in Bengaluru, Sahi offers an in-house charting and order-execution stack, a dedicated scalping terminal, and options strategy tools on a flat Rs. 10-per-order plan. It also offers a zero brokerage offer for the first 30 days for a new user. With over 4 million app downloads, a $10.5 million Series A (2025) and $33 million Series B (2026), backed by Accel and Elevation Capital, and a Fintech Startup of the Year 2025 win at the India FinTech Awards, Sahi became a top-20 broker in India within 18 months of launch. Learn more at sahi.com.
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