ICICI Direct misleading customers. Review on ICICI Securities

I have been a customer of ICICI Direct for more then three years now and had been using the equity trading services off and on. Though ICICI Direct charges the highest brokerage for trading, I found the integration of bank account, demat and trading account quite good and efficient. Another advantage I found was that user interface is user-friendly.Recently I got my personal finance management act together and immersed myself in analysis of various mutual funds and shortlisted a few and was ready to create SIPs using ICICI Direct services. To my amazement I found that the SIP offered by ICIC Direct is not same as one offered by Mutual Fund AMCs. In ICICI Direct you have to pay entry load every time where as usually SIPs offered by AMCs charge no such load on SIP investments. On sending a mail to ICICI Direct customer support, I did not get a satisfactory response. I feel that ICICI Direct should rename this service so as not to confuse the investors. In fact I recommended ICICI Direct to many people before I learnt about this, thinking that they offer complete investment services, where as, it is not so.

Time to update this. Since I wrote this review, ICICI Direct has introduced SIP facility "as offered by AMCs". But I think this has been done only after all AMCs increased SIP entry load to the same as for lump sum investments. ICICI Direct has proven beyond doubt that it is only interested in commissions that it earns and Customer is the last thing on their mind