FISDOM, co-founded by Anand Dalmia and Subramanya SV in 2015, is a rapid-increasing wealthtech platform giving options across investment, saving and protection.
Through its app, Fisdom delivers an array of merchandise/services that incorporate but are not restricted to mutual funds, National Pension Scheme, digital gold, insurance coverage, loans, and so forth. “We are a pioneer in the partnership-led wealth management model,” claims Subramanya SV, CEO, Fisdom. “Fisdom has built a B2C product but reaches customers through B2B2C partnerships.”
Over the final 4 years, Fisdom has tied up with quite a few big banks and monetary institutions to give wealth management services to their shoppers. Karnataka Bank, Indian Bank, SBM Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, City Union Bank, and digital platforms such as Bajaj Finserv Markets and TVS Saathi have partnered with Fisdom. Subramanya adds that shoppers of these institutions can use the Fisdom mobile app or the Fisdom SDK on their respective mobile app to access Fisdom’s options.
These partnerships provide big, exclusive access to shoppers. Together, Fisdom has access to almost 20 crore buyer base and 20,000 branches all more than India.
Banks also add an element of trust to the finish-buyer in their selection-producing procedure to obtain mutual funds, pension funds, and so forth. In addition, Fisdom serves almost 3 lakh shoppers, who actively transact/obtain monetary merchandise on its platform. “Even during the pandemic, Fisdom saw more than 80% growth in its AUM. The company is in the process of adding several more partners that include marquee names in the Indian financial services landscape,” says Subramanya.
Fisdom employs almost 400 persons across technologies, sales, and operations. It has almost a 200-persons sales group across the nation in one hundred-plus areas working with the bank partners. Talking about the initial years, Subramanya says, “I was a successful venture capital investor and Anand, an investment banker with experience in handling large M&A deals. As Anand and I had a background in financial services, our natural choice was to disrupt the Indian financial services. While we intended to build a large diversified financial services company, we chose wealth management as the starting point.”
According to him, access to wealth merchandise in India then (and now) was largely underpenetrated. Less than 2 crore Indians have invested in mutual funds or stocks to generate wealth. “Customers at large were staying away due to a variety of problems like lack of access, inadequate trust, lack of knowledge, time, etc,” he says. “This offered a large market opportunity to provide a tech-based solution that solves each of these consumer problems. The idea of Fisdom was to be a mobile-first platform that would help customers invest in mutual funds in a paperless manner, under a guided choice model without the use of any jargon.”
Fisdom has been backed by marquee investors such as Saama Capital (seed round), Quona Capital (Series A), and PayU (backed by Naspers) (Series B). At the time of founding, it raised an angel round of funding from quite a few person investors such as Raghunandan and Aprameya (TaxiForSure founders), Rob Chandra, Rajeev Chitrabhanu, Gaurav Gupta, and so forth.
Financial merchandise in India are nevertheless severely underpenetrated, specially in smaller sized towns. Fisdom’s concentrate places have been giving access (producing the most proper monetary merchandise accessible to a big quantity of shoppers), simplicity (eliminating jargon and complexity from monetary choices), and carrying out so in a trustworthy manner. It aims to be a monetary services corporation that assists shoppers access options across investments, savings, protection, and credit.