Digital payments company Paytm has announced the launch of a dedicated app for its newly formed subsidiary Paytm Money. This app will be for Mutual Fund investments as the company aims to double the Mutual Fund investor base in India within the next 3 to 5 years.
Starting September 4, Paytm Money app will be available for download on both Android & iOS. The company will start providing access to 2,500+ users a day and will increase this to 10,000+ users daily over the next few weeks.
The company has received an investment commitment of $10 million for setting up its operations from its parent One97 Communications Limited.
Paytm Money is the fourth consumer brand launched by One97 Communications Limited. Paytm says that it is also its very first entity to be built from scratch, operating independently and headquartered in Bengaluru. The business entity will focus on building investments and wealth management products and services.
Paytm Money claims to have witnessed huge consumer interest with more than 850,000 users registering for early access prior to its launch. With over 96% registrations being made from mobile devices, the company has opted for an app-only approach at its launch.
“Access to wealth creation opportunities till today has been limited to a select few. With Paytm Money we want to democratise and bring Mutual Fund investments to millions of Indians. We are committed to take the Mutual Fund investor base in India to 50 million in the next 5 years and expect Paytm Money to be the catalyst in bringing new incremental investors to this industry.” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of Paytm.
The company has partnered with 25 AMCs (Asset Management Companies) covering 90% of industry AUM (Assets Under Management) to offer direct plans of Mutual Funds which come with lower expense ratios due to zero distribution fees or commissions. Users can start investing in lump sum or via SIPs with as little as Rs 100 in some of the schemes. Paytm Money has tied up with leading rating services - MorningStar, CRISIL and Value Research to ease investment decision making process. The service will be completely free for its users.
Pravin Jadhav, Whole-time Director of Paytm Money said, “We are building a technology-based platform that offers both investment advisory and execution services, complete detailed risk profiling and provide all possible information to users before they take any investment decision. We are possibly the only company in investment and wealth management domain that has built the entire technology platform from grounds up. This gives us the capabilities to post transactions in real-time to all AMCs, get faster updates to mutual fund scheme NAVs, show the most updated portfolio value, generatereal-time portfolio insights, monitored by real-time reconciliation systems and much more. Our platform is built to handle over a million mutual fund investments per day.”
Over 65% of these registrations have come from B15 (beyond top 15 cities). To drive wider adoption in smaller towns and cities, Paytm Money supports investing from over 190+ banks through Auto-pay e-mandates, physical mandates and NetBanking. Its feature-rich Android app is also one of the lightest apps in this category. The company plans to invest further in product, design, data science and machine learning to analyse user’s risk assessment, recommend advisory portfolios and investment recommendations that suit best to the individual user from time to time.
Earlier this year the company received SEBI approval to act as an Investment Adviser (IA) and aims to provide both investment advisory and execution services. Paytm Money aims to become a full-stack investment & wealth management company.