The words ‘stock broking services’ should be enough to let you know—there’s a lot of money in this business. Institutional broking allows countries to rope in Foreign Institutional Investments (FIIs) and even domestic institutional investors.

This is why a clutch of home-grown retail brokerages are setting up institutional broking businesses. Even foreign brokerages have been sewing up alliances to grab a share of India’s retail broking pie.

Religare Enterprises has hived off institutional equities as a separate business unit, to cater to the investment needs of leading corporate houses and institutions. Backed by incisive research, this division would like to be seen as a one stop investment gateway and knowledge repository for its clients, servicing their unique and sophisticated needs.

Similarly, other retail brokerage firms are floating joint ventures exclusively aimed at institutional clients. They are also setting up institutional desks in major cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata and they are in the midst of hiring senior executives for their institutional brokerage firms.

That’s the trend that seems to be developing now—organisations are hiring more people for their institutional business. Others, who have merged with larger international companies, will get clients from a vast international network—a host of big foreign institutional brokerages have entered the retail broking business in India in recent times.

But larger international players have anything between 60 to 80 people for their institutional equity team and it would be a difficult task to attract big institutional business from these players, admit experts.

Another factor which is driving these firms to look for institutional business is the fact that retail brokerage outfits are getting a large share of revenues from pure equity broking—as it covers sectors like FMCG, Hotels, Media, Pharma, Auto, Cement, Steel Pipes, Logistics, Telecom, Construction etc. The volume of money flowing on a daily basis in these kinds of investments is truly large—thousands of crores is a pretty safe estimate.

All this points to a single, simple fact—there are enough money-making opportunities, if you are precise enough with your investments. It all depends on how you make your investment work for you. Even with the state of the market as it is today, investment broking is a lucrative option. If you aren’t impressed just yet, wait and watch over the next few years—there’ll be some jaw-dropping numbers for you to ponder over!