Finahub: The one stop shop for Retail Broking
Life seems so much easier when all you want is available in one single store saving you the time and energy to wander around in 1000 places. This seems to be the principle of kochi based website Finahub. Finahub originated from the terms financial hub serves to be the one shop for managing activities of retail broking.
In an exclusive interview, Co-Founder Ajith George shared with us a few words about this startup.
1. Could you shed light on your life before Finahub? What was your previous work?
Before Finahub I was working as an Engineer at a Software Product development company. I always had the urge to do something on my own. I started out contestpool.com to allow people to find and share various contests happening around the world. Yes, even the silly contests of collecting cookie wrappers and win prizes. It didn’t work out. Then I met Rajesh who was trying to do openones.com for listing and finding out the best open source software for every type of use. That also didn’t go well. Then we decided to do our future experiments together and this lead to the birth of finahub.com
2. What is Finahub and how does it work?
Finahub Internet Services is startup company based in Kochi, Kerala that provides SaaS customer engagement platform for retail broking firms in India.
Finahub with our, product Kinship Platform aims to be the one stop solution that addresses all these client engagement needs of the retail broker. The platform presently has the following capabilities to meet the requirement.
•Ability to easily interface with customers to know what they expect from them.
•Provide investment related training and know how to enable customers to become betterinvestors/traders.
•Enable the research team to send news and research reports to users based on user
preferences at the click of a button.
•Measure the ROI of research reports.
The product, Kinship Platform is in active use by two leading Kerala based broking firms. The company is in talks with 3 other broking firms as of now.
3. What motivated this startup?
Me and my friend Rajesh were in to investing in to stocks and at the time of 2008 recession time we lost money in the market. When we talked to friends about it, they said “You should have asked me before investing in that particular stock” This strike us and we decided to build a social network for the investors in the market. This started well with hundreds of users but building a business model around it was difficult as we had earlier decided not to show any advertisements in our platform as we believed ads are not cool. Later we pivoted and build a solution for the broking firms to service their customers. That clicked and we started our ride.
4. What areas in India are you covering?
Right now leading broking firms like Hedge Equities and Capstocks from Kerala are using our solution. We are also in talks with some Mumbai based broking firms.
5. What challenges have you faced in your entrepreneurial journey? What has been the toughest decision you had to make lately, if any?
Challenges are part of start-up life. We face it every day; sometimes it’s about delays in closing a deal, sometimes compatibility issue with IE browser. What moves us forward is a simple belief, “Every challenge comes with a solution, and we just need to find it”.
6. What are your plans for promoting Finahub?
Right now our focus is to strengthen our product by developing Android and iPhone applications for our platform which will make the life much easier for our customers. The company also plans to target major cities known for this industry such as Mumbai, New Delhi and Ahmedabad. We have already initiated talks on this.
7. What more do you wish to include to take Finahub to the next level?
We are only half way into Stage 1 of our 3 stage plan. We need to expand our team slightly to expand our market and product. We need funding to speed up our plans, and we have started to pitch our case. Recently NASSCOM has shortlisted us to the final round of their 10,000 start-ups program and we have initiated talks with some Angel investors in their network.
8. Finally, what advice would you like to give to other young entrepreneurs?
Never give-up. Every problem comes with a solution; you just need to find it. Perseverance is the key thing that makes you successful. Brace yourself for a ride. On a single day you may hit emotional ups and lows, but the key thing is to brush aside the dust and move forward. You will be rewarded for your hard work, that’s sure.
Build relationships not customers; it’s definitely going to reward you more.
Finahub certainly is good news for investors. We wish them great success for the future.