The WealthTech StalwartThe evolution of technology and the digitization of the BFSI sector has resulted in a better adoption of the products as India proceeds to be a digital nation.

Managing Money has been one of the pain points for the people of India. The fintech startups came as a savior of the masses and solving pain points for its consumers. The digitization of the finance sector got accelerated due to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The evolution of technology and the digitization of the BFSI sector has resulted in a better adoption of the products as India proceeds to be a digital nation.

A land of traditional savers, India has one of the highest savings ratios as a percentage of GDP at over 28 per cent. Mukesh P Kalra, founder and CEO, ET Money, saw an opportunity to educate Indian savers & turn them into investors by bringing better investment products to them. Equities as an asset class and Mutual funds as an instrument to invest in them emerged from the mid-2000s. According to Kalra, the allocations remained marginal as mutual funds constituted under 2 per cent of total individual wealth in 2010 and approximately 2.5 per cent in 2016.

"The assets under management of the Indian mutual fund industry have been growing at 18 per cent over the last decade and are slated to become INR 100 trillion before the end of this decade. We believe it's a significant opportunity to not just help people earn better returns but also channelize savings for growth of the economy," said Mukesh Kalra.

ET Money is one of the leading wealth management platforms in India, having over INR 600 crore in monthly mutual fund gross sales with an inflow of over INR 300 crore in monthly SIPs as well as having over INR 23,000 crore of assets being tracked on app. The app has been made extremely accessible as Kalra claims that over half of the investors on the platform belong to tier 2 or tier 3 cities.

One of the biggest reasons for the company's success has been its customer-education approach. ET Money has created multiple decision making tools which helps the investors take right investing decisions. Users can assess their investor personality on the platform, do a portfolio health check, and see a report card for every scheme. The products help investors understand their risk appetite, investment horizon, enabling them to take right investing decisions.

According to Kalra, people make wrong decisions in the absence of intelligent tools. "Asset classes have cycles and what performed in the past may or may not in future. We are focused on helping people earn better returns than selling funds. And that's what differentiates us from the rest of the pack," added
Kalra.

Kalra believes that in the consumer internet space world over, the first wave of innovation in every sector typically happens in making commerce easy. "Being an IT powerhouse, India always has had world's leading IT solutions serving banking, finance and allied industries," added Kalra. So, with onboarding and accessibility solved, the next challenge in the financial services industry is to assist investors investing right and help them reach their goals. And here again, technology has to be leveraged to provide this solution at a large scale.

"ET Money, being the first mobile first investments app, has also launched ET Money Genius, India's first membership service that personalizes investments and provides investors with investing intelligence to invest right. ET Money Genius personalizes investments of an investor to her personality, time horizon, goals, market environment to build investment plans and portfolios that not only help investors earn better returns in upmarket cycles but also fall less or avoid losses in downmarket cycles," commented Kalra on ET Money Genius.