Please tell us about your professional journey so far.
With engineering education in India, I have a stint of over 10 years in the United States with advanced management education and experience in US corporations. With investment experience of over 28 years in US, I am 3rd generation financial consultant who has helped deliver investment services across 150 global exchanges and 33 countries to Ultra HNIs, NRIs, corporates and service societies in various global assets including 40,000 global mutual funds, 30,000 global stocks, bonds and curated portfolios since 2001.
What was the motive behind starting MySmartStocks?
Global asset management requires a top-notch understanding of markets, inter-linked characteristics of various assets and an ability to make smart investment decisions. When the global financial crisis of Lehman Brothers’ collapse hit the market in 2008, we decided to precisely understand the behavioral aspect of investments and determine whether such events are predictable. After spending 3 years of research and development, MySmartStocks.com – a FinTech platform on Indian Capital to make prudent decisions was born and launched in 2012. While managing others’ money requires more fiduciary duties, MySmartStocks captures staying away from common mistakes with unconventional wisdom which is only learned through experience.
What are the offerings of MySmartStocks?
MySmartStocks is a unique and only product based on human behavior on finance as compared to other products based on technical and fundamentals. It helps build holistic equity portfolios for sophisticated asset managers allowing them to create the same with high-end automation by reducing risks in decision making. Various offerings are
- Portfolio risk management on prudent decisions
- Returns with Wealth creation index
- Prediction of Market Corrections
- Robo-advisory on exits (both profit locking and loss protection)
- Trend-spotting with visual money flow along with sectoral guidance
- Analysis across stocks, sector and market
What does your client base look like?
The product is admired by Alternative Investment Funds, SEBI registered fund managers, Financial Advisors and UHNIs helping them manage collective assets of more than Rs.1,000Cr since 2012.
Can you talk about what innovations you have introduced/ planning to introduce that are set to create new benchmarks for this segment?
Having experience of three cycles of global corrections with 28 years of investment in Wall Street, it has helped build this unique and one-of-a-kind platform. You will find a financial platform based on pure fundamental analysis or even based on technical analysis but none based on Human Behavior – this innovation is introduced by MySmartStocks.com. It addresses two innovations in one 1) Human behavior on Finance 2) Forecasting market correction before they occur with high success rate. They say that the market runs on sentiments and this is precisely what this platform addresses. It sets a benchmark, quantifies the human behavior be it exuberance or capitulation introducing a new thinking on how to make out-of-the-box investment decisions.
What are some of the challenges that you see in teams of asset management companies embracing new fintech solutions? What advice would you give to them?
Asset management companies internally have research analysts either none or a couple to few people. They may be using some sort of internal tools to third party tools for investments. But there are few challenges –
- Absence of internal skill-sets
- Even with limited internal skills, it restricts their performance against their own benchmarks
- The openness for adopting second tool is missing either due to lack of motivation, overconfidence or ignorance
I believe asset management companies can certainly add MySmartStocks to their bouquet of intelligent tools to achieve their performance standards.
What lessons can you share with other fintech startups to learn from your experiences?
FinTech is all about numbers. The large and comprehensive data with continuous benchmarking only justifies the success of a fintech. One of the foundations from our experience is that you need to work with your target clients as pilots to make it very useful for them.
What excites you the most in the field of financial technology right now? And how do you anticipate things to play out by 2030?
What excites me – the accessibility of analytics on fingertips which is only possible with financial technology – the speed, actions, automation and decisions
My experience suggests that the United States leads the space of financial technology innovations be it products or services. More importantly, they all will lead to how international trades occur across nations.
I think the time by 2030 and beyond will introduce sea-changes leading to how do we do day-to-day transactions -
- Mode of banking and using which currency?
- Digital vs print currencies
- Financial trade settlements
- Counterparty risk assessments
