Raghava
What made you venture into the fintech space?
Indian Institute of Management Indore’s alumnus Vivek Bajaj (PGP 2005) and Vineet Patawari (PGP 2008) and their partner Vinay Pagaria had started their ventures Elearnmarkets and StockEdge with a vision to simplify finance for everyone by providing right learning and relevant analytics for effective decision making in financial markets.
Vivek brings to table 15 years of experience of trading, investing and managing a successful proprietary trading desk. His strong educational background coupled with practical experience led to the birth of Kredent InfoEdge.
Vinay, a childhood friend of Vivek has a vast experience of 15 years of developing fintech software. His passion has led to the birth and continuous evolution of StockEdge.
Vineet, an educationist at heart and marketer at mind was instrumental in the development of Elearnmarkets. With more than 10 years’ experience in managing digital business and his deep passion for digital marketing lead to the penetration of both the products in the market.
The trio shares a deep passion for technology and has a strong background in finance from their experience and education. This naturally made them venture into fintech space
Please take us through your journey in the domain of financial literacy.
According to a survey conducted by Standard & Poor’s, over 76% of Indian adults lack basic financial literacy and do not understand key financial concepts.
We realized that poor financial literacy leads to the under-penetration of formal financial products (both asset and liability). Thus, we decided to build the complete ecosystem of financial management which would guide a user to learn, analyze and participate in various financial products the right way.
Kredent InfoEdge started catering towards this goal through scientifically designed courses through its venture Kredent Academy, set up in 2008. Its second venture Elearnmarkets, which was established in 2015, offers over 100 e-learning courses in finance and has trained more than 150000 learners till now. It offers various career-oriented courses with joint certification from NSE Academy, NCDEX and MCX and expert-led boot camps, seminars and webinars.
In 2016 Kredent InfoEdge introduced StockEdge, a self-help stock market analytics app that has been downloaded by more than a million investors till date. It has recently introduced StockEdge Club, which is an extension of the StockEdge App. The StockEdge Club is the first of its kind in India. It seeks to democratize the flow of information to and from the market participants. It also features seamless integration with the StockEdge App.
Later in our journey, we apprehended financial data, including market data and other corporate data undergoing phenomenal evolution with data technology like XBRL & online unstructured social data.
Thus, now we’re working on building an exhaustive database of structured and unstructured information related to the small and medium-sized listed companies in India.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting with the innovation? How is this going to affect them?
Our target audience is first-timers in financial management. The first-timers could be youngsters (around 3.5 crores students are pursuing graduation and above qualifications in India), job seekers, young earners as well as retiree population of India. Basically, anyone who is interested in getting into formal financial instruments is our best TG as they need proper knowledge and mentorship which is currently grossly lacking in the industry.
Our integrated solution will help individuals to become independent in their decision making.
What have been the difficulties in building this business
The biggest difficulty in building this business was to make retail investors believe that they need proper learning and one should pay for the learning. In India, people were used to losing money by improper advice/tips but were reluctant to pay for quality content. But now the scenario is changing, and we see more and more millennials are willing to spend money and time on value-added services.
What is your plan for the next 18 months?
Both Elearnmarkets.com and StockEdge are now generating revenue with satisfactory unit economics in places. Now we would be scaling them in terms of onboarding more users and improvising the technology. We are also evolving StockEdge is India’s first Social Investing platform with credible financial data and unbiased Robo analytics. This will need significant investment in technology, data and machine learning. We will be raising Series A to support the same.
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