'Banking' On, For Distribution of Its Financial Products Subramanya S V looking to onboard more banks as partners
By Deepa Vaidya
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"Fisdom is a consumer wealthtech platform that provides savings, investments, taxation, and HNI wealth solutions. Fisdom is a mobile app but reaches customers through unique partnerships with banks via a B2B2C distribution. 15+ leading banks in India with a combined customer base of 40 crore have chosen Fisdom as their exclusive wealthtech partner. Fisdom's platform is embedded in the form of an SDK into our partner banks' mobile banking suite with deep integration into their tech stacks," says Subramanya S V, co-founder and CEO, Fisdom.
"Fisdom app helps customers access a holistic set of financial products including stocks, mutual funds, pension funds (NPS), sovereign bonds, insurance, and tax filing. Through an intuitive user interface and rich dashboards combined with high-quality research content and guidance, Fisdom offers a superior user experience to investors."
"We will continue technology innovation that will provide enhanced access for customers. The next set of technology interventions will be towards customisation and personalisation of financial recommendations," he adds.
As many as 45% of Fisdom's customers are first-time investors in capital markets. In the last five years, Fisdom has, "One million customers in more than 570 districts across India and 76% of our customers are from Tier 2 and Tier 3 locations. Fisdom's total Assets Under Management (AUM) have doubled every year for the last five years and currently stand at INR 5,000+ crore as of August 2022," says Subramanya S V on the impact Fisdom has made.
Fisdom is the first wealth management firm for HNIs in the wealth-tech space. To stay ahead and relevant in a constantly changing marketplace, "We have a high-quality, nimble technology team led by seasoned leaders who have built our products from scratch and who also have the required domain knowledge. Our product teams keep an ear out for customers' changing preferences that loop back into our future product roadmaps," says Subramanya S V.
Speaking about the challenges, he says, "Our biggest challenge and opportunity is working with large banks that are at various stages of digital transformation. Our view is that all financial institutions and especially banks will have no other option but to embrace a digital future. Our distribution through banks is a significant moat that is difficult to emulate. As more and more customers start banking digitally, it will strengthen our value proposition and also enable banks to serve their customers better. "
Given the challenges, how difficult it is to reach profitability in the tech space. He says, "In order to reach profitability, it is important to keep the costs of acquiring customers under control, and also these customers should have high lifetime value. Also, it is important to keep the overheads under control by not ramping up headcount ahead of requirement. Fortunately for us through our partnerships with banks, our cost of acquisition is lower than the industry average. At the same time, we have been growing at a rapid pace," he says.
Over the next two years, "Our target for the next two years is to reach four million customers. We intend to onboard a few more major banks as partners."
