Hitesh Jain grew up in Kolkata and completed his MBA in Finance from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi. He got placed with Aviva Life as business development manager.
In his second stint, he spent almost a decade with a stock broking firm in Kolkata. In 2015, Hitesh was tasked to set up the mutual fund vertical for the company. In three years, Hitesh cultivated a client base of 10,000 mutual fund investors. Witnessing this spectacular growth, he realised that mutual fund industry has a great potential.
He decided to strike out on his own by floating Finomatic Consultants in January 2018. In a short span of time, his venture has built assets under management of Rs 125 crore in mutual funds across 6,500 MF clients.
Since inception, Hitesh aspired to dream big. “If I had started business as an IFA individually, I would have got 100-150 clients so far. Thus, I decided to build a sub-broking model which helps you scale up. I want to make it a one stop solution for all products,” says Hitesh.
Besides mutual funds, his platform offers general insurance, health insurance, bonds, equities and home loan products.
Hitesh is open to accepting all types of investors, be it high net worth individuals or retail. “Even Rs 500 SIP is crucial for us. We want to build a large retail base,” says Hitesh. Currently, the firm has monthly SIP book of Rs 1.7 crore. Hitesh aims to take it to Rs 3 crore by the end of this year.
To achieve this, he is on a mission to clock bulk SIPs. In 2018, Finomatic punched 595 SIPs to celebrate his first year of operations. On January 20, 2020, Hitesh broke his previous record by clocking 2,320 SIPs worth Rs 35 lakh through NSE MF II platform. This feat was achieved across 880 clients and 23 AMCs. The idea of SIP Login day was conceived to celebrate the firm’s second anniversary. “We got incredible support from NSE to make this difficult task successful. 100% of the trades were online and through the NSE platform only. More than 50% of the clients transacted were first-time investors,” says Hitesh.
He laid the groundwork for this feat two weeks in advance. Instead of reaching clients one at a time, Hitesh planned to reach them in group. Hitesh organised investor meets at a few locations to apprise prospects about systematic investment plans (SIP) as a tool for wealth creation.
Investors often ignore to increase their SIP commitments as their incomes increase. Hitesh thought this would be a good idea to nudge his existing clients to top up their SIPs to achieve their goals faster.
Hitesh believes in diversifying his product offering so that his revenues are not impacted by regulatory actions or market conditions. Finomatic allows investors to invest in multiple products including, life insurance and loan products under one umbrella. It has 75 sub-broking partners. Interestingly, Hitesh has been an early adopted of NSE MF II platform. So far, more than 90% of his clients prefer to transact online. This helps him cut costs and scale up.
The two-year-old start up now caters to more than 7,500 clients (6,500 MF clients + 1,000 in other products). The company is managed by a team of ten.
Hitesh, 33, aims to reach one lakh client base in ten years. “We don’t focus on AUM metric. Rather, we focus on increasing the client base. AUM is a by-product of our effort. We aspire to build a company like NJ India.”
