For our Sixth session of ‘rapid fire questions’, we’ll be speaking with Nikhila Putcha, and Sameer Shashank, founders of Money Planned (An automated and holistic financial planning app for millennials)
What are the preliminary key items that one needs to consider while innovating financial products for a traditional investment ecosystem?
In today’s day and age, the preliminary things to consider while innovating for any product in general are User Experience trends, Brand messaging and timing along with technologies that support the innovation like service models and channels.
Specifically while innovating financial products for a traditional investment ecosystem, Regulatory compliances and Ecosystem stakeholders/Enablers play the most crucial role.
How should founders balance between product innovation and regulatory compliance? What should be the approach in the absence of regulatory guidelines related to your product roadmap?
In key industries like Fintech, regulations, and compliance play a huge role in innovation and product development. Hence, founders need to be acutely aware of and play ball with the compliances.
Despite increasing the effort for product development, regulations mostly don’t interfere with innovation and are in fact seen keeping pace with times. They are even driving overall industry standardization in many cases. This in turn makes future innovation much simpler. An example of this is the Account Aggregator framework - which will enhance data security and make plugging into that data much simpler for Fintechs in the future.
However, in the absence of regulatory guidelines, it’s imperative for companies to think about product innovations as well with a self-regulatory framework. If there is unchecked growth in a certain direction, it would pose a great risk to the company when the regulations finally catch up.
Every such product innovation needs to be thought out in a flexible and scalable manner, so that future compliances become easy to incorporate. Designing product stacks in modular manners, self-identifying compliance risks and ensuring flexibility would help to mitigate future compliance issues and subsequent efforts to the best extent possible.
How are you focusing on securing customers’ personal information to tackle critical security threats that the industry has been facing?
We are following a multi-pronged approach to maintaining the highest standards of security for our customers’ personal information. Our approach to security is proactive. Here’s what we do to avoid the most common issues by using the latest and most secure infrastructure from AWS and Google.Â
With a highly secure 256-bit encrypted access to our servers for our customers and bank-grade security for data transmission and storage, we ensure our customers’ data is safe, protected, and is accessible to none but the user. To enable this, we are working with top industry and cybersecurity experts to guide our security practices and ensure that the latest and best standards are implemented. We maintain an automated security hub to scan and manage our entire infrastructure and keep it updated with the best security practices and the latest patches. We also use the latest technologies, platforms, and SDKs to ensure that every component of our platform has the latest security updatesÂ
What should founders expect while collaborating with established financial institutions and do to maintain the relationship?
Any collaboration with a traditional financial institution takes a lot of time, effort, and process to take off and get established. Cross-marketing from Financial Institutions as well might take a lot of time to materialize. Therefore, it would be prudent for founders to set their expectations of the returns from such partnerships realistically. As fruitful as such collaborations may turn out to be, a lot of compliance efforts as well might be involved to maintain or develop such relationships further.
How do you ensure customer retention & how important is user experience compared to traditional banking products?
At MoneyPlanned, we ensure customer retention through multiple strategies. Three of the most crucial ones are as follows:
Primarily a simple and delightful customer experience
Hyper personalisation and gamification of rewards & servicesÂ
Automated retention marketing and communications
Compared to traditional banking products, User Experience plays the biggest role as that is the hook, retention strategy as well as growth engine for Fintech startups.
With rising competition, what are the unique approaches to minimize acquisition costs and enhance CLTV?
With the rising competition, it might not be super effective in trying to minimize acquisition costs as that may drop the impression share. However, there are many great marketing strategies to improve organic growth and maximize customer loyalty as well. A few that have worked over the years are:
Innovative brand positioning and campaigns
Unique customer experiences and rewards
Offline, partnership-based targeting
Marketing stunts
How important is it to build customer awareness related to a product or service and what are the few items a founder needs to consider before developing a financial product?
Today, customers are inundated with options for products & services, as well an abundance of info about features and offerings. Hence it has become super-important to be able to build customer awareness in a very quick and memorable manner in order to simplify their decision-making process and improve conversions. Nowadays, branding and awareness are also being done together in the same marketing campaigns.
Specifically while developing financial products, there are a few key things that founders need to consider:Market sentiments towards said products and volatility: Even in the same category of target audiences, opinions about financial products change quite quickly and dramatically
Benefits, Pricing, and Positioning: Is the positioning and benefits about ease, or quality of service, or complexity?
Monetization models: Probably one of the most simple yet challenging aspects of Fintech
A venture in your sector and outside your sector you admire and why?
Tesla - for rapidly speeding up the electric revolution with advanced and attractive, yet highly affordable electric cars.
Some of the biggest challenges that the industry faces right now are? And what trends can be seen within the industry going forward
Particularly for Fintech, there are a few key challenges hindering rapid expansions-
Working with legacy systems and institutions like banks
Challenging and rapidly evolving regulatory environments
Monetization challenges in highly competitive markets
Scaling issues due to overall lower penetration in India
And there are highly positive trends around these points as well-
Rapid digitization and modernisation of the country’s financial ecosystem
Standardization and uniformity being brought about due to regulations
Rapidly growing adoption, awareness, and reach of Fintech products - allowing for a much better scope of monetization as well
That's all for today! We’d like to appreciate our portfolio founders Nikita and Sameer for taking out time from their extremely busy schedules to add valuable insights to our subscribers.Â
That's all for today! This space is for founders in the sectors and solutions we are bullish about, therefore, a call out if you are a founder building in the Fintech space, you can reach us at connect@huddle.work and we look forward to brainstorming with you. If you are an enabler and investor and would like a further look into our ecosystem, then we are happy to dive deep into these sectors alongside you.
These are popular questions that have been asked by our subscribers and have emerged across each of the themes covered. (Keep your questions coming our way and we’ll continue our best to decode for you!)
