FintastIQ is a trading strategy marketplace, In the description, it’s a marketplace for a strategist to devise their strategy and tell conveniently to investors. According to our research, more than 90% of all traders fail during their lifetime, around 80% of all traders quit after 2 years.
FintastIq is designed to help investors and solve real-time issues in the following ways:
- By giving timely notifications to our traders
- A platform that allows traders to build the strategy based on Quants and maths
- Easy payments and reconciliation
- Seamless integration with well-known broking firms
- Easy measurable reports
- Recommendations based on Risk willingness
USP of FintastIQ- It’s a one of its kind Marketplace which encourages researchers to build strategy while selling it to traders and investors. It can be summarised to be Amazon of the stock market. There is no player in this space and our history of high-end research gives us a real competitive advantage.
How Finto (mascot) helps? – Finto is the mascot of our Product FintastIQ. Its primary functions are to reverberate the vision of using AI-driven technology to solve trading problems faced by many consumers.
“Prem Prakash, CEO, CapitalVia Global Research Limited- FintastIQ will help to set your financial goals and technology give you an edge to find the closest solution to your financial goals. FintastIQ uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide you with an end-to-end solution, that starts at evaluating your SMART goals and risk appetite and ends at providing you a suitable trading strategy”.
Here are the responses from the CEO over the questions:
- How did the founders know each other; how did they meet and how was the idea conceived or background of the founder?
Rohit Gadia is the founder. He comes from a small town of M.P, Burhanpur. He has studied at Jain University, Bangalore and then at S P Jain Dubai & Singapore. During his graduation days, at Jain University, he got fascinated with the financial world. He started trading himself and found that there is a large market for scientific research as there were not many players providing the same back then. He conceptualized the idea of providing ‘Technical Analysis’ backed research recommendations to traders by founding CapitalVia Global Research Limited in 2006. After almost 12 years of extensive performance at CapitalVia, the idea of FintastIQ was conceptualized during a meeting with Prem Prakash, CEO and senior employees who thought of solving the problems that persists in the overall trade journey.
A pretty dominating trend over past few years in the market has been the adoption of technology and shift towards DIY model. Hence providing an end-to-end solution, making a completely DIY model and leveraging technology were some of the key aspects of conceptualizing FintastIQ. There are a few employees at senior level have worked closely with the founder on the idea.
- What is your company solving?
More than 90% of traders fail during their lifetime because stock trading is a complex activity. People, generally, take wrong decisions while strategizing (seeking advice) and executing. There are not many platforms in India which provides unbiased trade advice (from financial analysts across the world) and seamless execution, both at the same time. Since we have been closely observing financial markets and traders’ behavior for over 15+ years, we still see a ‘gap in the market’ and ‘market in the gap’
Earlier, we launched India’s first technical analysis-based research house – CapitalVia, in 2008. Over the years, it has grown exponentially and clocked a revenue of $2 million in FY19. It has changed the way people perceived stock trading in India. Now with 12+ years of experience in financial markets, we wanted to disrupt the way people trade by creating an AI/ML based end-to-end trading strategy marketplace, FintastIQ.
- Explain your business and industry ecosystem in India – how are different companies solving different needs, explain the scenario in B2B and B2C?
FintastIQ uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide you with an end-to-end solution. It starts at evaluating your SMART goals and risk appetite and ends at providing you a suitable trading strategy and aiding in execution of the same. It helps financial analysts to build, test, list and earn through their own strategies on the platform.
At present, there is no player in the market which is providing an end-to-end solution to the investors along with providing tools to financial analysts for building their strategies. No competition backed by growing Indian Equity markets is a sure shot recipe to make it big.
“Prem Prakash, CEO, CapitalVia Global Research Limited- In today’s digital era, FintastIQ will change the status quo of the investment approach as it will provide an edge to find the closest solution to your financial goals. FintastIQ has the technology, customer research and human-centered design to evaluate the SMART goals and financial profiling to provide a suitable trading strategy. It will not only change the customers perspective about the stock market but bring a unique pulse on cultural trends”
We are different from other startups (smallcase, Motiff, Betterment, TradingView) in similar space in at least three areas:
- We are the only ones offering a marketplace where financial analysts can list their trading strategies.
- The only platform to provide strategies based on investor’s lifestyle, financial goals and risk appetite.
- FintastIQ is the only platform where financial analysts can build, back-test, publish, and earn through their trading strategies.We truly believe that within 3 years, we can have more than 500K investors on our platform.
4. How does your product or solution work?
FintastIQ brings together trading community and makes the most sophisticated trading strategies accessible to retail investors, which are otherwise available to UHNIs & Institutional Investors. It helps investors in analyzing the markets smartly, getting actionable alerts and managing trade positions on the go. All this, with a click of a button, on a single platform.
The platform also enables financial analysts to build, back-test, live-test and publish their trading strategies. All these without writing a single line of code.
- How did you win your first client and your first paycheque? Please explain in detail
We launched our first strategy with an element of back-testing on historical data and an inbuilt optimization mechanism in it. This strategy was unique in terms of understanding the current market situation and optimizing the setup if the market conditions have changed significantly, thereby, giving an edge to the investors.
We rolled out this product for existing clients of CapitalVia and was well received by them. Based on the feedback, we later brought in a lot more value addition to the product. Then, we launched it commercially in Jan 2018 and got our first paid customer on-board in the same month. That month, we were able to successfully onboard 200+ customers for our product.
So far, we have been successful in terms of providing features and performance which is in line with the expectations from the product and hence the customers are satisfied.
- How much have you invested in your company personally?
Since its a new vertical of CapitalVia Global Research Limited, investments have been made in technology, platform development, manpower resource and marketing by CapitalVia itself. There have been no investments made at personal level so far.
- Have you raised money or angel round or seed round for your clients in the usa?
No, we have not raised any angel or seed round so far.
- What have been the difficulties in building this business?
The biggest challenge of building this model was to stitch all the parts together as everything from idea generation to idea execution is scattered. Bringing this all together through use of extensive technology has been a big task. The second biggest task was to provide some very sophisticated strategies by using state-of-the-art models and algorithms. The next big challenge was about market adoption because anything that challenges the status quo is not easily adopted, but once there are a few early adopters, it flies of well.
- What is your business model and how do you make your revenues.
As it will be a marketplace, there will be two revenue streams: one through traders and the second through financial analysts. Both traders and financial analysts would be paying a monthly subscription fee for using the platform. A major share of the revenue would come for traders. We will also charge a one-time milestone/goal achievement fee. Our objective is to bring class product and feature to masses at an affordable price point. We’re estimating revenue of about $500 per user annually and with 500K+ customers, we’ll be generating a revenue of $250 mn in three years.
- What was the most difficult cross-border transaction that you have done so far?
We are at the verge of taking it internationally. Our traditional products have been doing great in the international market, we are almost set to take this new age vertical to various international markets soon. We had participated in RISE conference (Considered as one of the largest gathering of investors, product champions, buyers and innovators) last year at Hong Kong where we had very good traction to our booth and presentation. The audience found it to be a very advanced platform and proposition and we are getting quite a good number of enquires as well.
- What is your plan for next 18 months.
We are planning to roll it out in three phases. Our phase -1 would be rolled out (Commercially) by April 21, this would have basic features of FintastIQ and more than 50 tried – tested strategies based on Quant and Technical research. The strategies would be backed-up with 10 years of back-tested data. Our Phase-2 would have a complete inclusion of AI and machine learning based technology which will bring in enough automation to offer seamless experiences to our subscribers. Phase-3, which should be rolled out in last 22- Early 23 would have 360* and one stop solution. You may call it a fully loaded version of FintastIQ which would also be the first in the class.
- Anything else that you want to add.
With FintastIQ, we would want to disrupt the trading market and would like to change the way people look at it. This model is easily replicable and we plan to go global in coming few years.
- What is the USP/value proposition
FintastIQ uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide you with an end-to-end solution, that starts at evaluating your SMART goals and risk appetite and ends at providing you a suitable trading strategy and aiding in execution of the same. It helps financial analysts to build, test, list and earn through their own strategies on the platform.
Some of the major features of the product are:
- Strategy Marketplace
- End-to-End Trading Ecosystem
- Scientific Risk Profiling
- Certified Trading Experts
- Gamification
- Strategies Complementing Lifestyle
- Goal based; AI driven strategy selection.
- Completely DIY model
- Can be replicated Globally.
- Trading terminal of strategies
Through DIY model, investors are able to do goal-setting themselves and then pick the strategies best suited for their investment needs. Post that the strategies start suggesting trade recommendations which can then be executed from the portal itself.
- What are your revenues like today and how much do you expect to make by the end of this year.
Since, the app has not been formally launched yet, revenue figures are not in public domain. However, as a first step, we have launched the trading strategies through offline channel and onboarded about 5K customers in YTD FY21.
Our next plan is to formally launch the platform and grow exponentially to 500k+ customers over the next three years.
