Demat Account Experience: Kotak Securities v/s ICICI Direct

Just thought of blogging some experiences together:

* Customer Support: Kotak has been giving a good Customer Support so far. Especially in Kotak Bangalore, these folks were pretty professional. They respond better on phones than e-mails. In Hyderabad they are again just Okei types. They do respond to emails though.
They send the person to customer's door, if urgently needed. So far, all the trading recommendation they have made to me, appeared pretty wise except that I lost some INR's in TVToday. So I find Kotak better in this regard.
ICICI customer support is just ok. They unnecessarily call you hundred times with no solid information in hand. They also don't seem to have sufficient market information.

* Charges & Brokerage: Kotak appeared to be much less charging to me. ICICI annual fee and transaction fee is high compared to Kotak. In some special schemes ICICI intraday charges are low, otherwise Kotak is better for intra-day charges as well.

* Trading: Kotak has a secured web-site. All transactions need password confirmation, which is good for users. They also allow us AMO (After Market Orders) and orders at triggered prices. This helps reducing trading time. However, changing the password after a certain time period is a must with Kotakstreet.com and the total user experience is not very intuitive for new users. Never used KEAT, an online trading tool, which some people find better in speed.

* Money transfer: ICICI seems to be better in this. In Kotak one can transfer money from Citibank / ICICI bank account to Kotak any time. But for reverse there is time limit till when can you request.
One can also put a condition that anytime amount in demat exceeds a limit; remaining amount gets transferred to the bank-account linked with. Not sure if this is the same with ICICI.

* IPO Application: Kotak folks do come to give forms at your door steps and collect them back as well. This was pretty smooth in Bangalore but not that good in Hyderabad.
ICICI folks do not do this.
However, unlike Kotak every time I applied for an IPO through ICICI I did get some number of shares allotted to me.

Also, Kotak allows selling shares even when one doesn’t own them(assuming the price will increase later in the day). ICICI bank does not provide these facilities. Deciding whether it's good or bad is upto you. Sometimes Kotak tricks really work well but otherwise you end up selling something you don't own and then you need to provide those shares in your account within a fixed time period or else you get penalized.

So far I have had good transaction experience with KotakStreet.com but for some reason I have got a bit more shares allotted to me when I submitted IPO applications through ICICI.