Fintso: Are Financial Advisories Worth ?

• 13 May 2020 | 1260 Views | By

Fintso is a progressive Wealth Management platform that aims to provide smart solutions and allied services to the tech-savvy investors in India. It is a deep-tech based B2B2C solution that democratizes investment planning through the existing unorganized Investment Managers and Advisors. Fintso aims to create a channel for independent financial entrepreneurs to do more and do better for their clients in the financial advisory ecosystem. It expands the reach of financial advisors to a larger audience and addresses their needs in a much efficient and effective manner. Fintso acts as a tech-enabled bridge between the new (and existing) savers and their financial advisors. In simple words, Fintso is an advisor to its customers’ financial advisors.

How Fintso Works?

By using technology and automation, Fintso is trying to solve the problem of information asymmetry and non-standardization in the financial services domain. Led by a team of both technology and domain experts, Fintso is gaining a lot of traction in the consumer as well as business space. Through the use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the platform helps a financial service provider to showcase offerings, expand capacity, and service a wider audience in a cost-effective manner. Architecturally, Fintso is available as a Paas (Platform-as-a-service) on the cloud. By hosting on the cloud (AWS), the team is able to leverage expert capabilities of hardware, infrastructure and data management, while having the freedom to focus on the domain expertise and address more pressing financial advisory issues.

Fintso is built as a set of micro-services available on a subscription-based model. Fintso has its own website, a back-office website, a client Mobile Application, and an Advisor Mobile Application. As with any other Financial Planning and Advisory platform, it is as easy as setting up a profile on the Fintso to start your investment journey. The platform is still in its nascent stages and is developing each day. At the very core, the Fintso app aims to enable an ecosystem that covers all aspects of financial management by achieving 3 major objectives:

1. Nurturing Client Relationships

Financial advisory is the art of understanding the client, his needs and goals, and then suggesting the most suitable mix of investments based on an individual’s risk capacity, goals, timelines, and emotional triggers. To be one with the client’s financial needs, Fintso works along three dimensions:

a) Active Engagement

A client App regularly provides updates to its users about the latest news, trends, opportunities, and risks in the financial space. It helps a user save more by offering a wider array of products and services at their fingertips.

b) In-Depth Advisory

When a customer build their portfolio via Fintso, the app constantly monitors the holdings to mitigate risks and suggest possible realignments. It uses a simple questionnaire to access your risk profile which in turn helps the platform to suggest and design portfolios for long-term investments

c)Digital Presence

With their state-of-the-art technology infrastructure, Fintso provides on-the-go access of client’ portfolios and the corresponding analysis to better understand their needs.

2. Seamless Operations

In their drive to bring financial planning and advisory closer to the average Indian consumer, Fintso has developed operational capabilities in the following areas:

a) Product Outsourcing and Curation

The Fintso team regularly curates a catalog of Financial Planning products for its customer. With their deep research and domain expertise, they expose their clients to the latest trends in Fintech Innovation.

b) Operational Execution

By the use of RPA and ML, the Fintso eliminates human intervention in operational tasks thus reducing the complexity in the end-to-end processing for all products offered.

c) Intelligent Monitoring

By using advanced analytics models in the background, Fintso is able to leverage insights about client portfolios and provide prompt analytics and advisory about their investment mix.

3. Productivity Enhancement

With its robust technical background, Fintso makes all client/agent tasks highly intuitive and easy to administer. The most efficiency-boosting areas in Fintso are:

a)Invoicing and Reconciliation

Fintso leverages automation to reconcile receivables and generate invoices. It also efficiently monitors and transfers historical client data, thus achieving daily reconciliation of transactions more efficiently and effectively.

b)Regulatory Compliance

By maintaining a record of client communications, Fintso ensures statutory reporting compliance.

c) Data Management

The most important aspect of online financial transactions is Data Security and Privacy. Fintso provides contemporary security features such as 256-bit encryption, anonymity of client data (both personal and transactional), and provision of access-controlled vaults for data storage

The characteristics of Fitness and other Financial Advisory Platforms are similar to your personal (more human) Financial Advisor in the sense that they clearly understand your investment goals, are well-equipped with market trends and knowledge about financial instruments, and are adept at providing prompt advice to strategize your financial decisions in real-time. These qualities are hard to find in Robotic Advisors or Chatbot, thus the preference to consult such virtual advisors may prevail.

Which platform is best for Mutual Fund Investment?

If you are aware of the mutual fund industry and are an active investor then it is highly likely that you are aware of various platforms for investment in such schemes. There are various online Mutual fund investment platforms available these days – both for the newbie investor and the veteran alike. Based on their ease of access, cost, and feature offering, the Best Direct Mutual fund platforms and Apps in India are listed below:

Zerodha Coin

This platform is completely free of cost no matter how big your investment is. This platform helps you buy Mutual funds directly from asset management companies with zero commission. It has a website as well as an app where investors can see their portfolio performance and easily buy or sell their holdings. This platform, however, does not provide any advisory support.

Kuvera

Another truly free platform for investors that provides goal-based investment suggestions. The platform also highlights risks associated with each mutual fund and helps the investor in goal planning, selection, rebalancing of portfolio, tax saving, etc. It also supports a family account feature to enroll all family members using a single account.

Read more about Kuvera here.

Goalwise

It is a one-of-a-kind mutual fund investment platform that provides robotic guidance to novice investors. It helps the investor in fund selection, asset allocation, financial planning, and more at a nominal fee. 

ETMoney

It is one of the most well-known apps in the financial planning domain. IT provides a host of financial planning tools, one of them being mutual fund investments. This app helps an investor in selecting appropriate funds to invest in, completing their KYC, and facilitating the verification process. It helps an investor to seamlessly move through an investment without any paperwork. One can manage all investments, even those made through other means, via ETMoney. It is an extremely intuitive and customer-friendly app.

Groww

This platform provides mutual funds from 37 AMCs and gives a detailed and comparative evaluation of various mutual funds. Investors can directly connect with financial advisors on the App to get valuable insights while tracking all your internal and external mutual fund transactions. One major disadvantage of this platform is that it does not have a SIP calculator thus investors are not sure how much they should invest.

There are various new entrants in the market as well such as Paytm Money, Fintso, Piggy providing similar or better services. With so many options at hand, it is wise to choose the one providing enough guidance and analysis about your finances based on your investment style and risk appetite.