Ms. Nehal Mota, Co-Founder, Finnovate, reveals that How Finnovate is able to plan families financial life effectively
Finnovate is India’s first end-to-end ecosystem to manage your financial life and reach Life Goals. In a way of explanation- Finnovate is a wealth tech platform which offers unbiased holistic personalised financial planning and investment solutions to working professionals, high-networth individuals and families.
Incepted in 2007, Finnovate is a SEBI-registered tech-based platform that helps families create an unbiased financial life plan (powered by algorithms and expert insights). The platform then helps make investments in a well-researched and curated portfolio across various financial products. The track feature help families receive performance updates on all their investments that enable them to track past performances, set future milestones and tweak the way to meet their financial goals.
As a result of this comprehensive framework by Finnovate, families achieve complete financial well-being. Ms. Nehal Mota, Co-Founder, Finnovate share more insights on the same.
- Please tell us a little bit about your business, its area of expertise, and the services it offers.
- Finnovate is a Financial Fitness Management company that uses a hybrid tech+advisory model to enable busy professionals reach their financial fitness goals by focussing on all aspects of their financial health – Budgeting, Risk and Investments
- Our expertise lies in helping clients build a holistic perspective of their Financial fitness needs throughout their lifetime, and thereafter partnering with them to
- Build their personal FinnFit plan that would help them achieve their lifelong financial fitness.
- Choose research backed investments across diverse asset classes, suited to their personalised plan
- Implement the plan seamlessly using our dedicated service team
- Monitor Portfolio real time on FinnTrak
- Review and Rebalance portfolio based on changing life circumstances & dynamic Financial Markets and therefore
- Achieve their financial fitness goals an average 4-5 years ahead of schedule
- We offer the entire umbrella of services any client needs to achieve their financial fitness.
- Financial Planning using Certified Financial Planners
- Risk Management offering cutting edge, best in class risk products that cover all of our clients’ risks – life, health,critical illness, litigation
- Multi-Asset Investment Management offering everything from direct equity, MFs, Debt instruments, PMS to unique investment options like P2P, and even AIFs, PEs
- Estate Planning
- Are there any major issues the business has currently come across? If yes, share details.
- We are focused on financial planning, so finding qualified people in financial planning and training them to give clients advice suited to their unique situations is an ongoing challenge.
- Keeping pace with regulatory changes has always been challenging in the financial services industry.
- What are the goals and missions of the business? Briefly describe your experience since the company’s inception.
Our Mission to enable every Indian to become financially fit.
Our goal is to help busy successful professionals attain financial fitness so they can live a fulfilling life.
Since 2014- we have educated over 30,000+ people about financial fitness and served over 2000+ clients, along the way building an AUM of 400+ crore. However the achievement that makes us the most proud is that among clients who have spent > 3 years with us, over 90 Percent have reached their Financial fitness goals, and 75 percent have reached it 5 years sooner.
- What sets your business apart from rivals as its most distinctive quality?
Our rivals are mostly wealth advisory firms. However, we like to distinguish ourselves from traditional wealth advisors in the following ways
| Financial Fitness Planning | Wealth Advisory |
| Begins client engagement by understanding client’s lifestyle, life stage, money goals, risk profile and hence assists client in building their financial fitness plan | Begins client engagement by recommending investment products without building context about client needs. |
| Follows a disciplined investment approach by adopting the ARC formula: Asset Allocation, Regular Savings, and Power of Compounding. | Investment advice is usually ad hoc and/or has a narrow lens that ignores the client’s role in wealth growth through regular savings. |
| Is a one stop solution for all the clients money needs.: Considers everything from Cash flow optimization, Tax Planning, Risk Management, Debt Management, to Investments to ensure a client’s holistic financial fitness | Is piecemeal – wealth advisors often only offer mutual funds and/or direct equity, PMS etc, but rarely address other critical components of a client’s financial fitness like Risk or Cash Flow Optimization. |
| Has a long term focus | Might be transactional in nature, sometimes. |
- How do AI and Big Data help Finnovate deliver their services?
Finntrak : our proprietary platform is a one stop tracking platform that empowers our clients to manage and track their entire portfolio in one place.
Using Big Data and our proprietary algorithms, we are able to deliver a personalised FinnFit plan for our clients in under 10 minutes.
We use predictive AI to help clients visualise the long term impact of their money decisions in real time.
- Amount of funding in the inception year? Did they get any seed funding?
- Just closed pre-series A round of approximately $1 million. Our investors are strategic in nature and bring to the table a deep understanding of wealth-tech and of the consumer segments we intend to focus on.
- What initial and ongoing obstacles did they encounter, and how did they get past them? Did they first face any opposition from clients or funders in this situation?
- We are category creators in the financial fitness planning space. This means this offering is not well understood and often confused with discount broking or traditional wealth management. We need to educate clients and the market to move away from ‘stock tip’ or market movement based ad hoc investing focussed on short term return to holistic financial fitness lead disciplined investing focussed on the long term.
- VC/Funder Perspective: The PE/VC world believes only a tech-driven platform can scale quickly. While this is likely true with discount broking, or single product platforms, our experience has taught us that earning a client’s trust so that they are willing to allow us to manage all aspects of their financial fitness requires us to manage more than their money. It requires us to manage their fears, anxieties, hopes and aspirations – and that requires a human touch. So the hybrid approach of a tech-driven platform with human advisors is important.
- What sort of marketing difficulties did they encounter?
In this crowded space, how do we differentiate ourselves from wealth management firms, individual agents and bigger banks? How do we make people understand what financial life planning means? Everyone talks about investments, which is one aspect of personal finance. How do we differentiate and stand out is the marketing challenge.
- What aspirations do you have for your growth in the upcoming year?
- We are targeting 60k+ families, AUM of 10k Crore approx.
