In 2015, we incorporated Finwizard technology, the company that runs the brand Fisdom. Investing was a pain in the back for customers then. It took anywhere between a few days to a couple of weeks just to complete the KYC. The difficulty of sieving through the jargon around financial products made it even more painful.
Most investment companies had someone visit the customer with a bunch of papers and a pen to help them invest. These were the days of demonetisation and long before the UPI revolution. The usage of apps for financial transactions was limited to e-commerce. Thus, from the very beginning, we had a single goal – to make investing as simple, accessible, and trustworthy as possible.
Since then, while a lot has changed, many things have remained the same. We still see investing as a complex activity, everything is jargon-filled, mis-selling is rampant, and personalization at scale is absent. We at Fisdom remain stoked about solving these challenges for our customers.
In 2016, we started with just one product – mutual funds. But we have several firsts to our name. Fisdom was the first company in India to completely digitize account opening and KYC process – something which subsequently became the industry standard. Also, we’re the first company in India to introduce the use of a payment gateway to process mutual fund transactions on the BSE platform. We were also the first to digitise Pension funds (NPS) completely. Another first for ours was launching a goal-based investment solution.
Over the next 3 years, we added insurance, tax filing, and stock broking. Recently, we also added an HNI wealth management business to serve the mass-affluent and affluent segment of customers.
Our biggest achievement by far has been convincing large banks to work with us to help their customers access investment solutions right within their mobile banking apps and in the branches. Today, we work deeply with 15 national and regional banks where we run their wealth-tech business.
With the Fisdom SDK integrated into the bank’s mobile and internet banking apps; we are present in nearly 50 million phones in India. Today, we serve only one million customers out of those 50 million. But we’re just getting started. There is still much of the iceberg beneath the surface waiting to be explored.
Our tribe of 500+ Fisdomites are even more passionate about our objectives than we were on day one. Seeing our customers achieve their dreams through investments keeps us excited and wanting to do more. Indeed, there are a wealth of possibilities.