Why launch another finance portal in India? How can one create differentiation in this crowded market? No doubt that Moneycontrol needs a serious competition and while startups like MoneyVidya have taken an analyst-driven approach, Paisa.com (newly launched startup) takes a much different approach towards stock investment, i.e. of a better User experience combined with a to-the-point intent of the user, i.e. portfolio management.
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that most of the Indian finance websites do not care about usability and are loaded with namesake feature sets (leave alone the bombardment by banner advertisements). User experience takes the back seat and as a consumer, you probably have a very few portals where you can interact with other investors as well as get analysts perspective.
Pune based, Paisa.com enables users to create their portfolio (or import from moneycontrol) and in future, plans to integrate with brokerage accounts as well as bank & credit card accounts. The business model revolves around lead generation as well as upselling financial instruments (like credit cards, loans etc).
The site boasts of beautiful typography and offers a very neat interface (look at stock comparison screenshot) and they live upto the usability USP (learn ATD, i.e. Attention-to-Detail from these guys).
Pure Play on UX? Given that there are a whole lot of other destination sites that enables portfolio management, the challenge for the team is in tangibilizing its USP (how do you convince a Moneycontrol user to shift from MC to Paisa.com?). What Paisa can also look at is demystifying some of the stock market jargons for an average user.
Here is a quick QnA with the Paisa team on their business model, future plans.
Roadmap – I am assuming that paisa.com doesn’t stops at research. Would like to understand product roadmap – what are you guys planning for future? How are you going to make money.
In India, today there are mostly two kinds of finance websites — those which are destination sites which drive a lot of traffic into them and make money purely through ads and then there are others which are purely for generating leads. Currently there are no “good” finance websites in India which do both properly. Our vision is to build a great website for the average Indian trader by providing her with easy to use tools to manage her assets and when we do have substantial traffic, we want to make money through lead-generation. We have just taken the first step to our goal by building a stock/mf research & portfolio management application. We currently allow our users to liberate their Moneycontrol portfolio by using our seamless Moneycontrol importer. In the near future we are going to integrate
Paisa with brokerage accounts and then eventually do the same for bank & credit card accounts. We have also thought about some social features which are coming up soon. Once we have that, we would upsell our customers various financial instruments and credit cards, etc.
What gap do you currently see in the market that made you build this service?
Despite the presence of a plethora of finance websites in India, we found almost none of them to be “usable”. These sites are mostly operated by large media companies which don’t “get” technology or user experience. The result is pretty shabby. Many websites have portfolio applications but they are either half-baked or are unusable. Ditto with Stock/MF research. We saw that as a huge gap and decided to disrupt the sector with a world-class application.
USP – How different is this from other services?
User experience. We just want to delight our users and give them what they need. Everything else is secondary.
Domain name – cant believe that squatters didn’t know about this domain name!
My co-founder & CEO Abinash bought the domain in 1999. We didn’t have to pay anyone 🙂
Currently paisa.com supports only BSE index – plans for NSE?
We already have the data. We are currently figuring out how to present it to the user in a good way. Since the numbers are usually similar anyway we’ve left it out for now until we figure out a nice way to show both BSE & NSE prices/stats together.
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Give Paisa.com a spin and share your comments. Do you think experts/analysts add value to a finance site? Is that one route where Paisa.com needs to dwell on?
Breaking News – While writing this article, I realized that Guruji has shut down its Finance portal, finance.guruji.com. Know of details, please let us know (ashish @NextBigWhat.com)
