ICICI Direct Sucks..!!!!

Yet another day when the ICICI Direct website goes down. Its become all too normal now. And yes, ICICI direct follows Murphy's Law. The site is down whenever you need it.

Suppose its a bullish market and you want to buy stocks, you wouldnt be able to buy.
If the market is crashing and you want to exit, you wouldnt be able to exit.
Market opens at 9.55 am. you would only be able to open your account by 10.45 am.

Infact whenever its works properly, I begin to worry if everythings all right.
I have worked in the IT field before and pretty well know some of the issues that they are facing.

An IT system is built on the models of scalability in the future. You just cannot design a system for today. You have to think of the future and the growth in your customer base. As for ICICI Direct, they have only worked on increasing their customer base and not worked on scaling up their systems and hence all the servers and databases are not able to take the load (the sessions that are created whenever you log into the database ), Once you log in, a session is opened at the database and once that crosses a limit that it can handle, the entire database crashes. If its running at full utilisation its begins to slow down. Now a cause for concern is the initial model that they have built. If you screw this system up, then you are going to have loads of issues when you scale up your system.
From the looks of it their back end systems are pretty screwed up. And am just worried as to how long this will go on. This is because whenever you click on the BUY
or SELL button. There are loads of procedures launched and triggers fired(IT jargon - Dont worry about it). So any screw up in the system could be fatal. A possible example is that you buy the shares, your money gets deducted and no shares get credited to your account. But it would reflect in the back end systems that the shares have been credited. I also saw this on one discussion forum where a guy wanted to buy MFs and the money got deducted but he did anot get any units. In fact i myself tried buying MFs from ICICI Direct and just as i was going to click on the final button, i thought i should see the Terms and conditions. I was shoccked to see that they happily stated the following. "Neither ICICIDirect, nor any of the Mutual Funds shall be liable for any failure to perform its obligations, to the extent that such performance has been delayed, hindered or prevented by systems failures, network errors, delay or loss of data due to the above and in circumstances of acts of God, floods, epidemics, quarantine, riot or civil commotion and war." Just google ICICI Direct sucks and you will get tonnes of stories :) .

Just try calling up the ICICI Direct customer care. You will mostly get the automated reply - Due to the high call volumes we will not be able to take your call.Please call later". A classic example of how if IT systems are not implemented properly it is a disaster in the making.

Anyways....Its another painful day where i want to check my cash projection and i only get the below message. Its been 8 hours since its down.




P.S. - I remember in my earlier workplace our client(telecom player) used to strip us naked in case we asked even for a 4 hour downtime on early monday mornings when there would be no calls to the customer care. And that too these would be maintainance downtimes and not even a system crash like is the case with ICICI Direct. And the best part is - ICICI Direct crashes during market hours. Absolutely inexcusable.

And yeah, if you want to definetly loose money try intraday on ICICI Direct :). Only these people can make you go from a profitable position to a loss making one. Frank advice to all people. Please stay away from ICICI Direct..!!!


GYAN :- For the uninitiated ICICI Direct "provides" online trading services in Stocks, Commodities and Mutual Funds.