FinTech demand is increasing rapidly and it becomes a determining factor for banks and financial institutions' survival. FINCART is a comprehensive hybrid tech platform. The platform customizes personal finance solutions for individuals based on their requirements & inputs. The client onboarding, financial transactions, and portfolio progress are tracked online. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Tanwir Alam, Founder, and CEO of FINCART.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

FINCART is a comprehensive hybrid tech platform. The platform customizes personal finance solutions for individuals based on their requirements & inputs. The client onboarding, financial transactions, and portfolio progress are tracked online. There are human financial counsellors who handhold clients in their investment journey; popularly known as online assisted models.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Most people are used to buying financial products without evaluating if that is going to suit them. Our approach is not to sell yet another financial product but provide a holistic solution that helps to inculcate an efficient money management process. In short – The core purpose of the company is to help Indians achieve their lifetime financial goals.

3. What made you quit your well-paying job and kick start your own venture?

Prior to starting Fincart I was with IDFC MF as Director & Head – Of retail Sales. I had the opportunity to interact with National Distributors, boutique wealth management firms, and Independent Financial Advisors and understand their business model. On the other hand, I had friends who were corporate employees. There was a huge gap between what the financial distributors brought to the table and the expectation of corporate employees.

I saw a huge opportunity to serve the corporate employees and help them with holistic solutions. I mustered the courage of quitting a well-paying job and kick-starting my own venture.

4. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

We provide a comprehensive personal finance solution that includes planning to fund Children's higher education, to buy any assets such as home/car, Retirement planning, tax planning, and even estate planning.

5. What is your Leadership Mantra?

The value of the company to a great extent defines my leadership mantra. We have summed up our values in the word "E-SPIRE"

I believe in educating the team, empowering them to make decisions, and enabling a culture where it is fine to make mistakes but one must learn from their mistakes. They become accountable, take ownership of their job and live the values of "Stewardship".

If you take care of your employees, they in turn take care of the clients. Our values of "People-centricity" & "Integrity" address the same.

I firmly believe that "people do not care how much you know, they want to know how much you care". Our value of being "Responsive" takes care of the same.

If we do all these things right, consistently it becomes a habit. Our last value "Excellence" is nothing but a habit.

I would like to end it with a quote from Zig Zaglar, "You do not build a company. You build people, they build the company".

6. If robots completely replace the need for manual processing, what will happen to the future of the workforce?

Covid has accelerated the digitisation process. Further, the use of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning will play a key role in automating a lot of these manual processes.

Having said that, low financial literacy could be a big bottleneck to Robo-Advisory. Financially aware clients are opting for Robo-Advisory solutions and further, it is noticed that when the investment amount increases they prefer to have some kind of validation from an expert or financial advisor, hence the Robo-Advisory is at the moment plagued with lower ticket size.

7. What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

We are a judicious mix of deep domain understanding and technology. We have three distinct unique propositions – Solution Oriented Mindset, Online Assisted Model, and Hybrid Tech Platform. It's a judicious blend of technology & human.

8. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

The BCG – AMFI report suggests that the Mutual Fund Industry will grow from 38 Lac Crores to 100 Lac Crores; from 2 Crores unique investors to 10 Crores unique investors. The need to have 5 Lac Mutual Fund Distributors from the current 1 Lac Agent.

We have carved out a simple vision for ourselves and we wish to achieve it by 2030. We want to partner with 50,000 Agents and get to our goal of serving 10 Million Customers.

9. How are disruptive technologies like IoT/Big Data analytics/AI/Machine Learning/Cloud Computing impacting today's innovation?

We believe that Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning will play a critical role in transforming the Wealth-Tech Industry. The AI/ML has to be built on human intelligence. We are one of the financial intermediaries who talk to clients and record conversations. We will leverage this data to build AI-enabled Advisory solutions. In times to come, the financial literacy of Indians will also improve, hence the adoption of such automated solutions will grow.

10. The industry is seeing a rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector?

We have been the early adopters of virtualization. We started phone-based advisory services in 2013. The storage of data over the cloud has made life a lot easier. You can run virtual offices from anywhere. The financial service industry has already adopted cloud technology. However, it is a little difficult for big elephants to change overnight, hence there still exists a brick-n-mortar model. We have the advantage of being nimble & asset-light by focusing on delivering services digitally & virtually.

11. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

Human advisors discuss to understand the client's needs, they feed those inputs into the system. The system customizes a personalized solution, the clients are onboarded digitally, the investments are done online and then the advisor along with the client tracks the client's financial progress online, and does periodic review to ensure that the clients achieve their lifetime financial goals, safely & surely.

Tanwir Alam – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanwir-alam-5132927/

FINCART – https://www.fincart.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/fincartfinancialplanners/