MUMBAI: Upstox entered the Indian stock market about a decade ago with a pricing model and technological edge so disruptive that within a space of a few years, it went from a small-time broking application to become the country’s second largest stock broker.
Being a technology, disruption and evolution is the steady state and the company’s co-founders believe the next step in that evolutionary process is to become the destination of choice for all financial services solutions in the country.
“We want Upstox to be the financial services brand of choice to the millennials across the spectrum. So we are no longer going to talk about just broking, we want to be in financial services,” Kavitha Subramanian, one of the company’s three co-founders, told ETMarkets.com in their first-ever joint interview.
Upstox’s ambitions are bold, as it looks to enrol over 300 million users on the platform by the middle of the decade. However, it wants to do so by focusing on the product, instead on poaching from the competition.
“What we see as evolution is how firms are going to start differentiating themselves,” said Shrini Vishwanath, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
In Vishwanath’s view, Upstox will offer products that fall under the purview of traditional financial services or banks and would entail cross-selling of different financial services.
“We are going to add new products to make customers come back in a way where they discover things and are not just there to transact,” he said.
The idea, on its face value, is akin to an online marketplace for discovering not only what a user wants to buy, but why she should buy it and what information she needs to make that choice.
“We want to go as mass as possible. I think that will require a lot of innovation. We are adding a lot to that tool kit and you will see a tremendous amount of innovation coming out of Upstox in the next few years to come,” Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ravi Kumar said.
While the co-founders are aware of the evolutionary path the company will take in the years to come, how it will do so is still not very clear. Upstox is considering plans to either become a ‘super app’ in the mold of Alipay or a splinter of apps providing different products like Google.
“We are definitely looking at expanding the scope of services that we want to offer to the end customer whether that is delivered in a single app or different apps remains to be seen,” Vishwanath said.
