Techiexpert Team had an opportunity to talk to Mr. Vijay Kuppa, Co-Founder, Orowealth

what is that one problem you solving

Orowealth is an online wealth management platform for retail investors. Retail investors don’t get access to good quality financial advice as they are often mis-sold financial products. Orowealth provides high-quality low-cost financial advice to retail investors with the help of technology.

Background of founders, there journey

Orowealth was started in January 2016 as India’s first zero commission investment platform. It has three founders:

Nitin Agrawal: Nitin is the Co-founder & CEO of Orowealth. Prior to Orowealth, Nitin was associated with Deutsche Bank for 6 years in Equity Structuring across their London and Singapore offices.

At Deutsche Bank, Nitin successfully designed and sold several billion-dollar investment solutions to some of the biggest global investors. His last position at Deutsche Bank as Vice President, Equity Structuring. He has an MBA from IIM Bangalore and has a degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay.

Vijay Kuppa is Chief Operating Officer at Orowealth. Prior to starting of Orowealth, Vijay had 6 years of investment experience in equity and fixed-income markets. He was associated with Larsen & Toubro Ltd. (Mumbai, India) as AGM, Treasury. Vijay was managing a $1.5 bn investment portfolio focused on Indian markets in his previous role at L&T’s Treasury. Vijay has an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and a degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay.

Yogesh Powar is Chief Technology Officer at Orowealth. Prior to starting of Orowealth, Yogesh had worked for 7 years as Technical Lead at Marvell Semiconductors managing multiple global clients. Yogesh has an M.Tech degree in Computer Science from IIT Bombay.

The founders had the hypothesis that retail wealth in India is going to grow and within the wealth pie share of financial assets will increase even further. When they studied the Indian wealth market, they found that space is marred by a huge number of inefficiencies where retail investors are often mis-sold financial products and good quality advice is inaccessible.

Orowealth is trying to address these issues. We are building a wealth management firm for the mass affluent backed by regulatory changes and changing the profile of investors, we take away the transaction costs of agents and brokers in the investment process and help people manage financial investments hassle-free with better returns.

Idea & Motivation to productive?

We saw a huge difference in the way retail investing works vs. how institutions manage their money. We believed that we could make a difference in this field by getting the basics right with minimum hassle for the end investor – unbiased evaluation of investments, building a diversified portfolio and ensuring that we lose as little as possible to fees and commissions.

leveraging emerging technologies (AI, Deep Learning, Etc.)

We are extremely data-driven as a startup. Over the past three years, we have accumulated Rs 3500 cr in Assets Under Advisory across more than 100,000 users and analyzed over a million portfolios. The data-driven model gives us great insights on user-profiles and portfolios which in-turn helps us with portfolio recommendation and actionable insights for our end users.

USP of Orowealth

Our USP is personalized advisory we provide to our customers vs. a pure transaction platform which many other platforms offer. On our platform, the portfolio recommendation is unique for each individual. We also provide dedicated Relationship Managers for every user who continuously look into the issues of the user and suggests the best possible way to make more return. Apart from this, we are a multi-product platform and provide Goal advisory, customized financial planning, stock advisory, alternative investments in addition to a mutual fund platform.

Early days struggle.

The one issue in particular was – Lack of awareness among the investors. With multiple firms providing free access to their product and also the companies dealing in regular commission-based mutual funds advertising so-called “free” advisory, it was key for us to raise awareness among the retail investors about zero commission fee-based advice. Also, another hurdle was making people understand the importance of investing and building trust.

Funding Details

The company has raised $1.6 mn in Series A Funding. This round of funding was led by Powerhouse Ventures with participation by Money Forward Inc., one of the largest publicly listed fin-tech companies in Japan; a prominent US VC -Social Capital, under their Capital as a Service program; B Dash Ventures, one of the largest VCs in Japan; and other prominent angel investors including Anand Chandrsekaran and Dinesh Agarwal, Founder India mart. It had earlier raised initial capital from GSF Accelerator and prominent individual investors.

UserBase …

We presently have a user base of 250K+ users, out of which 100K+ are transacting users and still expanding.

New Areas if they are looking to expand.

We have started offering alternative investments to our customers like P2P loans as an investment class, receivable financing, stock advisory in addition to mutual fund advisory and financial planning services.

Future plans

We will continue to work on our mission to make all retail investors financially independent. We are building a tech-enabled wealth management firm which could provide personalized advisory to millions of users.

Is there any plan to integrate with 3rd party apps /services

We already are using multiple 3^{rd party software’s} for various purposes from analytics to marketing, communication and customer servicing. Yes, if we see such technologies are useful for our users, we would definitely incorporate them.