I had opened an account with Kotak Securities during sometime in 2004 or so. When my account was opened, I used to connect it with the Citibank to do the trading. During those initial days, the KSTrading was pretty close to the customers trying to support the customers and also was interested in improving the tools to do the trading.
I opened another account couple of years back which is called as the Kotak 3-1 trading after getting confirmed from the sales executive that it is very similar to the ICICIdirect.com 3in1 trading account which I used during the year 2000 until 2004 since the operating costs were higher than other competitive places. However, my experience in trading with ICICIdirect was amazing except for the fact that during the initial days, the system was pretty slow.
This year from Feb 2012, KST has increased the charged for Demat exit charges from Rs 25/- to Rs 28/- per transaction and the monthly demat account rental charges from Rs 30/- to Rs 45/-. Well, I am not really concerned about these fixed charges, but my concern is mostly about the fradulent way of taking the customers for a hike and charge 23% interest on the shortfall in the money in the account.
The main problem is that the customer is expected to manual trigger the transfer of money from the Kotak Bank to KST and vice-versa. The transfer of money from Bank to KST would transfer immediately within few minutes, however while trying to move money from KST to bank, it would take 3 working days.
For example, if you had say 50K in your IPO/MF account and you want to move that money to your bank account for a day and then transfer during the 2nd day to the equity account, it is not possible. The 50K will lie with Kotak for 3 working days(5 calender days on weekends or more). This means that if you do such a transaction, you will miss to pay the money on the next day and would be charged at 23% interest for those many days. All these days KST would not be paying any interest to you as a customer but if if we miss one day money in the equity account, they would charge at 50K23%5/365= 157.5 as interest charge. However, they will not pay you for the five days that you were expected to get paid in similar lines at 23% which would be Rs157.5 . So what ever happens in KST account is a one way account that would benefit only Kotak and does not benefit the account holder.
I had escalated this matter to KST in 2009, but there is no action from them until now. This means that it is an open cheating, and if anyone wants to take them to the consumer court, please do so.