“Only 2% of India’s population is invested in non-banking financial assets” – By, Mr. Vivek Bajaj, Co Founder, Kredent InfoEdge
How did the founders know each other; how did they meet and how was the idea conceived or background of the founder?
Kredent InfoEdge has 3 founders. The company was started by Vivek Bajaj for training individual investors from Kolkata on various aspects of finance through their offline centre Kredent Academy. Vivek Bajaj is a Chartered Accountant, Company Secretary and an MBA from IIM Indore and his family owns the largest proprietary trading desk in Eastern India.
Vineet Patawari, joined the enterprise to take the working of financial training to all over the country through the online platform elearnmarkets.com. Vineet Patawari is a Chartered Accountant and an MBA from IIM Indore with strong understanding of building digital properties.
Vinay Pagaria, the third co-founder is instrumental in building StockEdge, which is gradually recognised as the Bloomberg for retail investors. Vinay has over 15 years of experience in the domain of financial data and software development. He is a Chartered Accountant, Company Secretary and Certified Systems Auditor.
All three are from Kolkata and share the common passion of democratizing financial markets in India. Both Elearnmarkets and StockEdge are working on this mission of simplifying investing for everyone through right learning, access to accurate data and unbiased analytics.
What is your company solving?
Investment in financial assets is complex and confusing. Traditionally there has been high dependency on financial intermediaries for right advise. However, the wealth creation from financial assets has been limited to only selected population.
Only 2% of India’s population is invested in non-banking financial assets. The core reason for such low penetration is lack of trust. This can only be solved with widespread unbiased knowledge dissemination.
We are giving power of right knowledge in the hand of retail investors. Knowledge in the form of access to financial data, unbiased analytics and right learnings in the most effective and affordable manner.
Explain your business and industry ecosystem in India – how are different companies solving different needs, explain the scenario in B2B and B2C?
As mentioned earlier in the last 20 years the financial market has been dominated by financial intermediaries and finance media companies. Financial Intermediaries were enthused with the responsibility of providing complete solution viz transaction platform, research service, advisory and training to their clients. Financial Media enterprises have been providing all kind of information e.g. news, views, data etc to the society in large.
However, as industry is evolving from sellers’ side to buyers’ side, each component of traditional service is witnessing disruption. For example, the transaction service is now been taken over by specialized transaction platforms like discount brokers. Similar research and knowledge service are getting disintegrated and more and more independent platforms are emerging in this space. “Less is More” has become the new norm in information domain.
We are building a neutral value-added platform incorporating research and knowledge service for investors and new generation advisors. This could be compared to other platforms like Bloomberg, Reuters etc which are largely used by large wholesale enterprises. We are building similar ecosystem but for retail investors for cost-effective value additions. There are various individual players emerging in this domain. However, we are providing the most integrated solution with regional focus for better user experience.
How does your product or solution work?
There are 4 stages of investment lifecycle for any individual: a) To become more self-aware; b) To get access to Data and Analytics; c) To collaborate with others for idea d) To transact with personalized financial goals.
We are building an ecosystem for benefit of any user who comes to the market at any stage of the lifecycle. If one is a beginner and want to start, we have developed structured learning flow in multiple language. If someone who is already there in market and would like to become more independent in doing their own analysis, we have built India’s best financial data and analysis tool. All our products are deeply integrated with each other and have strong flow which makes a user move up the value chain for his/her prudent investment journey.
We intend to develop more product/features around this Lifecycle which will help the individual to build trust on his/her own ability and become a better investor.
What is the USP/value proposition
Our USP lies in two aspects: (a) We have strong founding team with relevant experience in finance and we understand what really works in financial market. (b) Our products have deep financial learning integration with regional language focus for better user engagements.
We presume that a typical financial market participant does not have knowledge about various aspects of markets and needs a knowledge integrated framework.
