PhonePe sees opportunity to bring everyday savers into equities with PhonePe Invest

Payments firm PhonePe on Monday rebranded its investing and trading platform ShareMarket as PhonePe Invest broadening its approach to include investors who want to enter equity market according to news agency PTIThe digital payments and fintech major said the transition enables the wealth offering to reach a broader audience making investing more accessible to PhonePes large and diverse user baseExisting ShareMarket users will retain their investments and account continuity with no changes to brokerage structures fee plans or annual maintenance charges the company saidWhen we started ShareMarket it was designed actually to serve the active investors and traders Rahul Chari Founder amp Chief Product and Technology Officer told PTIHe noted that this represented a small segment compared with PhonePes wider user baseOpportunity for small investors to enter stock marketThe Bengalurubased company said there has been participation in financial savings products beyond metropolitan and Tier 1 cities including gold fixed deposits and mutual funds due to the ability to invest small amountsChari described this as a sachet model of financial services that has helped bring more people into the fold and broaden participationChari said PhonePe allows users to invest in gold and mutual funds through daily systematic investment plans SIPs starting at Rs 10 while lumpsum mutual fund investments can start at Rs 100The opportunity for us now as we continue to grow the active investor and trader segment is to actually bring in the millions of users who are investing in their first mutual fund on PhonePe or have been actively investing in gold Chari saidHe added that the companys rebranding strategy will allow the small investors to participate in the equity marketPhonePe Invest is basically a bridge from PhonePe for the savers and the firsttime investors to participate in the equity market And with the rebrand we are also launching Portfolio Optimiser which is a suite of tools that allows you to take the entire journey from building a first portfolio to being able to track your portfolio whenever you want to have it actively tracked and analysed by the platform and to give you a singleclick opportunity to optimise it he saidResearch on PhonePe invest started a year agoPhonePe Invest platform combines stocks intial public offerings IPOs mutual funds and FampO offerings along with Portfolio Optimiser The platform has been developed over roughly a year following research involving existing PhonePe users who had started investing in small amounts as well as users of ShareMarketPhonePe Invest marks an important evolution of our wealth offering As we unify the wealth and broking platform under the PhonePe identity the PhonePe Invest brand reflects our ambition to democratise smart investing for all Indians just as we democratised Indias payment ecosystem Chari saidChari said the research examined what discouraged potential investors from entering the equity market and what additional tools existing investors needed to boost their investments The broad requirements were making investment less intimidating and bringing portfolio analysis tools into one placeWe are bringing together smart products and tools which will enable investors to build review and optimise their portfolios he saidThe tool has three components a portfolio builder an analyser and an optimiser The builder guides new investors in selecting investments across categories such as stocks mutual funds and exchangetraded funds ETFs The analyser assesses portfolio health and provides researchbacked signals whether to hold monitor or sell investments Optimiser aims to improve diversification and portfolio healthTrying to use language that is simple handholding the user through the lifecycle and being there through the entire lifecycle of your portfolio continuously is the approach that we have taken Chari explained adding that the tools are not limited to beginnersAI strategyPhonePe is also pushing for artificial intelligence AI to make investmentrelated information easier to understand with potential applications including voiceenabled onboarding summarising news related to a users watchlist or portfolio in different languagesThe company is also exploring a chatbot within PhonePe Invest and Chari said Having a chatbot that is within the PhonePe Invest app where you can actually talk to it about your own portfolio as well as have MCPs through which you can actually use your favourite AI chat surface to export your own portfolio and have a conversation about your portfolio externally both we will supportWith inputs from PTI