Wealthy helps users make smart investments using technology

Managing investments could be a tedious task, and some planning can always help. These days, you don’t really have to go looking for a good advisor as there are online services and apps ready to bring all the information to your fingertips. One such is Wealthy, an online investment service that aims at making investments a breeze with its paperless process. “We are in the business of making people Wealthy by helping them take smart investment decisions with as little as Rs 2,000,” co-founder and CEO Aditya Agarwal tells us. It was while running a real-estate investment platform and being a part of a few angel investing groups, that Agarwal realised how people around him have been struggling with investments, especially those with extra surplus and no clue how to go about investing. This led to the formation of Wealthy.in, along with Prashant Gupta. Agarwal has studied at IIT Bombay, and was a Management Consultant with Monitor Group before becoming an entrepreneur. He quit his job to grow family’s small marble and granite business in Rajasthan and also started a real estate investment platform called getSquareFeet. Before Wealthy.in, Gupta was working with Morgan Stanley in London as Vice President, Equity Derivatives Structuring. He has earned degrees from IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad. “Our Eureka! moment was his (Prashant Gupta) suggestion that why don’t we automate the investment advisory and continuous portfolio management and make that available to retail clients in India. He had seen this being used by banks across the world for their wealthy clients. Once we tested the feasibility of automating advisory the path to realising the dream became clearer. Completely paperless KYC and on-boarding was another breakthrough for us that helped setup an Internet-only financial services firm in a short period of time,” Agarwal said. Explaining the process  of investments at Wealthy, Agarwal said, “We ask users a few simple questions in a delightful manner to customise the investment plan. Once they agree to the investment plan, they proceed to open an account with us using their email or social logins. Post that, users have to provide their PAN number followed by some very basic personal details. Once their KYC status is ascertained by our system, which happens almost real-time, they can proceed to make their investment online. The entire process takes less than 2-3 minutes. After the online payment, investment folios are opened typically in less than 48 hours. Details of the investment are then available on dashboard. Users can also make withdrawals directly from their Wealthy dashboard.” Wealthy’s investment plans include different kinds of mutual funds that are selected using a rule-based system rather than human-based selection that would be erroneous. The company’s focus on automation using technology is what they claim sets it apart from other similar offerings. They plan to make smart recommendations based market movements and whether it’s a good time to withdraw the investment a part of their next offering. “In our next offering, our algorithms will maintain asset allocation for each investor at all-times and dynamically re-balance the portfolio as and when the market conditions affect the allocation,” he said. The startup accepts a fee from the product manufacturers for every rupee of investment by clients. Agarwal says the revenue model is akin to SaaS business where they earn a subscription-like fee for as long as client continues to use the product. The only difference, he mentions, is that manufacturer pays the fee instead of the client. Wealthy has received angel funding of 1.6 crore from investors, which is being used for talent acquisition, strengthening the platform and exploring new opportunities. The company plans to scale using a mix of customer initiatives and offline partnerships.