Chennai: India’s fintech startup world is seeing a makeshift trend as the country looks to promote itself as a superpower in all possible fields. With companies and the industry growing at an exponential rate, the market is expected to surpass $73 billion in 2020, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 per cent.
Samco Securities Limited, a fintech startup recently inaugurated its research, analytics and development Centre in Chennai at an investment of Rs 20 crore. The firm claims the R&D centre to be the first of its kind in the city.
News Today caught up with founder and CEO, Jimeet Modi, chief technology officer Pratik Adani, and head of Technology (Chennai), Sundaresan R, to know about the firm’s objectives with the new centre in the city, growth plans and fintech market in India.
“We are now a company of over 250 people with our headquarters in Mumbai. Our top two businesses include brokerage business and mutual fund research and distribution business. As of March, we recorded revenues of Rs 55 crore and profit after tax (PAT) around Rs 25 crore. We’ve been an immensely profitable company in a short period of time,” said Jimeet.
“Chennai is going to be our second biggest centre and office after Mumbai,” he added.
Concepts to products
The firm’s CTO was asked how the firm created their flagship products StockNote and Rank MF. Pratik said, ‘We have customers from more than 3,000 cities across India. We are highly tech-driven. Our whole approach in building our products is to provide an execution-based platform. Most firms expect customers to know what they want to buy or sell. That is why we built our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) engines throughout these past four years to help the customers make an informed decision.’
“Rank MF was built to handle the fact that there are 3,500-4,000 mutual funds available. Customers end-up trying something and lose wealth. They are our biggest competitors and not other players. Customers who lose money in the market and never come back are. We want to help customers in not losing money and create wealth. We went ahead, ranked and rated all the schemes in the market using AI. This runs on a daily basis. We are not doing it manually,” said Pratik.
Pitching in, Jimeet, said the response to their products have been “very good and interesting”. “The biggest hit is the smart SIP, with which one can get a compounded return of over 19 per cent,” he added.
Asked if they decided to go tech-driven from the get go, the founder said that was the plan.
“In today’s world, if we have to reach to people across the country and scale fast, unless we adopt technology in every aspect, we will not be successful. We have been very clear that we have to be a fintech and we have to be wealthtech and that we cannot do things manually. Even the smallest of things that we do ini our organisation, we try to automate it and try to prevent manual intervention.”
Chennai focus
“That is one of the reason that we came to Chennai because our focus is on technology. We want to go way beyond what we are right now,” said Pratik asked about the reason in choosing the city from Tamilnadu when Pune and Bengaluru are close options for the Mumbai-based firm.
“By investing in an R&D centre in Chennai, we are making sure that we are future ready and invest more in technology. The idea is to concentrate on three things – people, processes and products. We want to extend our current technology and develop new products. We will be extending our top products StockNote and Rank MF and will also be rolling out upgrades. The next product will come out of Chennai within the next six months,” said the CTO.
Demon was…
“Deomentisation was great for us. People who did not believe in alternative financial assets, started investing in such schemes (after demonetisation). It helped people in the organised sector like us tremendously. More money in the banking channel is all the more better for us. People who kept money in fixed deposits started looking for alternatives as fixed deposit rates fell. People became informed that there are more avenues to invest,” said Jimeet.
Touching upon the tier-II cities, Jimeet said, “People find that financial assets are better than gold or buying a land because it can be liquidated when necessary. We see the trend accelerating from tier-II and tier-III cities,”
India & the world
Speaking about how much potential India holds when it comes to the industry, the heads of Samco Securities unanimously stated that the country has not even scratched surface of an technologycial iceberg.
“We are not close to even becoming mature, forget about saturation point. Hardly one to 1.5 per cent of the population is only investing. The younger generation is more aware about investing in financial products. That inflation point will come but when it somebody’s guess,” said Pratik.
Jimeet however had more positive news. “The way we operate from a regulatory standpoint is very good. From a penetration point it is very poor. That will increase over a period of time. The good thing is that the environment set by regulators is future oriented. This is a good sign for growth when they do not get in the way.”
The frim hopes to keep their growth at a 100 per cent year-on-year for the foreseeable future. “We are both well funded as well profitable, so that is quite unique,” declared Pratik.
| Why we chose… |
| “The biggest challenge we have is customers need intelligence while they come into the market and we wanted to help them through tech. That needs lots of research. The Chennai R&D centre came after a long exercise. We hired a firm to do research and selected Chennai. Bengaluru has become costly. The tech talent available in Chennai is huge and people have great culture here. The city has great product companies for India and to the globe. We want to do the same. Chennai builds great products and services for international markets. We want to use it for India. There will be 100 people in the next 12 months and 200 in two years. Those will be direct jobs. We will be investing heavily into the facility. It is the technology aspect of ‘Make in India’,” said the firm executives on why they chose Chennai. |