Meet The Investment Guru of Millenials Who Made it to The Entrepreneur India's 35under35 List How this entrepreneur is making investment simple for millenials

Blenders Pride Reserve Collection presents Entrepreneur's 35U35 list included some path-breaking names from the field of entrepreneurship and the new-age Investment Guru, Ishan Bansal, made it to the list owing to a startup he co-founded to resuscitate millenials' interest into investment.

For the 30-year-old Ishan Bansal, it was disturbing to accept the fact that the majority of Indians, especially millennials, do not like to invest. He says, "I could not understand why Indians were so disinterested in investment." If you look at the stats, only 2 percent of the Indians invest, he adds.

Ishan, an MBA in Finance from XLRI Jamshedpur, and who worked for five years in the financial services domain, says, "One reason I could figure out behind Indians' reluctance toward investment, especially among millennials, was that investment as a practice is perceived to be quite complex."

This is where Ishan says he found a business opportunity. While working in Flipkart, he discussed this looming gap in the financial sector with his colleagues: LalitKeshre, Neeraj Singh and Harsh Jain. Together, they agreed that the same could be converted into a viable business model. The quartet, subsequently, decide to take the plunge, quit their jobs, and launched Groww in 2016 with an investment of Rs 10 lakh sourced from their own savings.

Ishan says, "Groww is an online investment platform that makes investment simple and accessible for everyone. It allows users to open accounts electronically and transact in mutual funds."

The company in its short 2.5 years of journey has bounced from strength to strength. At present, its web platform and mobile app attracts 3000 sign ups a day, and its total number of users have reached a million, transacting daily Rs 20-30 million in mutual funds. The company so far has raised $ 8.2 million of investments.

But, the journey of registering continuous and steep growth was not an unhindered path for the company. According to Ishan, the company, initially, could gain only 100 subscribers, who transacted an insignificant amount. He says, "Earlier, we were giving our users options of only three mutual funds, which we thought were the best for them. Later, we realized that Indians like choices. We cannot impose our choice on them." The company, therefore, tweaked its approach, and started providing users a wide range of mutual funds, which today stand at 5000. And, since then, the growth has been crazy, says Ishan.

Growwth Plans
"We want to expand to stocks on similar lines i.e. "Simplification'. Further, we have realized that it is not just investment that people want to get simplified. There is a myriad of other financial services too, where simplification, if introduced, can be a potential business opportunity", says Ishan.

(This article appears in the February 2019 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)