ETMONEY is India’s fastest growing investment and wealth management platform with a total of over $3bn worth of investments under management. In less than 5 years, ET Money has built a solid customer base of over 10 million users across 1400 cities. The platform has been a pioneer in building industry-first technical solutions like paperless video KYC for MF investments, the country’s first Aadhar-based SIP payment feature, amongst others.
ETMONEY Genius enables people to create and manage their own wealth by providing investing intelligence that is personalized to them. The intent to launch this membership with a new brand identity is to make sure that investments can be personalized and every Indian can now have the intelligence to create and manage wealth for their goals, themselves.
In an exclusive chat with medianews4U Mukesh Kalra – Founder & CEO – ET Money speaks to us on the rebranding of the logo, the upheaval one is witnessing in the wealth management space, personalized investment ideas, and much more…
The personal Investment and Wealth management space in India has seen a major upheaval in recent times, what do you attribute this to?
The pandemic created big disruptions in all spheres of our lives. Conventions about how we want to live, what we want from life, whom we want to work for, and from where. We have questioned it all. The disruptions have made us all take a hard look at, well, our money. Somewhere we have been forced to relook at the way we have been managing our money in the past. We have been made to question if we are managing it well enough to ensure we can live the future we always wish for ourselves. This has brought record inflows into the markets & started a bigger movement towards the financialization of savings.
‘Generic investing is hurting the Indian investors and why do you need a personalized approach to investing’….can you elaborate on this?
India is witnessing a phenomenal influx of new investors. These investors are lapping up every investment product that is available in the market– from Mutual Funds, Stocks, NFOs, IPOs, to Digital Gold, ETFs, Crypto, NFTs, Bonds, InvITs, and so on. But there is a problem here. Today, everyone has become just a shopper, a buyer of investment products, a collector of wealth products, pretty much mirroring the way we impulsively buy goods on online shopping sites. Investors are doing this ignoring that with every product you add to your investment portfolio, the complexity & pain to manage them also increases. Eventually, as an investor you are left to answer many confusing questions – should I invest more, how much, when, where, if & when should I book profits or sell altogether? Well, we took this as a challenge to solve & hit upon a unique insight which is probably the root cause of this shopper problem – No investment product in India has ever been personalized for the individual investor. Not a single Mutual Fund or a Stock Portfolio has ever been made for someone’s investing personality, risk profile, time horizon, evolving needs, or even the changing markets. No one has realized that your behavior and financial situation is as unique as, well, your fingerprint. This insight led us on a journey to create investing intelligence that is personalized to each and every one of you. Making investments personalized is the need of the hour and ET Money Genius is a revolution towards doing that.
Investments always have a forever problem of suitability. Not every investment product, a category within a product or asset class suits universally. But the suitability problem doesn’t stop anybody from not venturing out and being adventurous. This is because people fall prey to FOMO. However, a mistake everyone is making or at least most are making is people’s allocations aren’t right – meaning – either you are under-invested in asset classes suitable to yourself or are over-invested in asset classes that are unsuitable to yourselves. Not to mention that the bulk of monies are still lying in FDs & physical assets. So, one makes a multi-bagger return on a very small portion of one’s assets, if at all.
There is risk in this generic – I will invest the way everyone else is – way of investing is one’s risk appetite to one’s unique life situation, career graph and life goals can be at disconnect when Mr. Market decides to correct and one is fully in Equities. Also, when everyone invests the same future risks increase and future returns reduce. ET Money Genius solves for this.
The new brand identity & logo – The Wheel of Wealth looks very interesting, how was this thought of and the significance to wealth?
This new approach comes on the back of a deep consumer understanding exercise that revealed a growing phenomenon, that of individuals breaking away from the pattern of life stages and goals and consequently from set ways of looking at investing their money. Being a digital-only investment platform, ET Money believes it is perfectly poised to speak to the individual investor and their evolving mindset around money and wealth.
The key focus of ET Money’s new branding strategy, as a result of this shift in consumer mindset is the focus on personalization. To ensure a hyper-personalized experience for this new reality of Indians, ET Money has revamped its entire App, brand identity as well as a new design system. It has unveiled a new logo, called Wheel of Wealth that signifies stability, protection, personalized approach to wealth & the sense of freedom that wealth gives to an individual to make & live their life choices. Each quadrant cues a different pattern of growth, representing the diversity of the portfolio and coming together in a strong circular unit representing our individual-centric approach. Elements of the logo come to life in the brand touchpoints, extending vitality and visible expressions of transformation to all communication.
What is the road ahead for the investors in the country?
Access just creates the ability to invest or transact. With the increasing reach & interest of investment products, it’s time that the investors got access to intelligence too. Because intelligence is needed to make returns and avoid or reduce losses. And that’s when wealth creation happens. The intelligence of reducing/ avoiding losses and increasing returns can be far more impactful when intelligence is personalized to one’s risk appetite, personality traits and time horizon, and life goals. As of today, the intelligence that people get is in the form of generic advice or tips but future intelligence is about when to sell, how much & from where. Genius is going to make a beginning on that path for Indian investors.
