Feroze Azeez (Left) and Amit Rathi Amit Rathi , Director and Feroze Azeez , Dy CEO , Anand Rathi Wealth , in conversation with ET NOW as the company gets ready for IPO.
Anand Rathi Wealth has set the IPO price band at Rs 530-550 and the issue is to open on Thursday. How has the journey been so far?
Amit Rathi : The journey sometimes seems great in hindsight but when we started the journey, we did not realise how big an opportunity we were tapping into. When one starts any business, one thinks this is one more business around mutual fund distribution that one can go after. But when we tried to navigate the new business, we realised that at the end of the day, the focus has to be on the customers and the more we listened to customers, the more we understood we wanted to do this business a little differently than how we imagined.
I thought a lot about what the industry was doing and that journey has been exciting. We have been joined by a huge set of professionals who really helped us grow over this period. Client goodwill is one of the biggest factors for growth in this business. It is references from existing clients that help it grow and they are the biggest brand ambassadors and that is the barrier to entry for us in terms of growth and also for new players in this industry.
But we have discovered along the way and it has helped us that the focus is on client polls and not to think of ourselves as merely a distributor of financial products but rather how we are trying to help solve customer needs and customer problems. So working with customers, helping them identify their needs, spending that time and effort and it makes it a little longer sale cycle but helping the clients think through their goals much more clearly then trading, creating a financial plan or strategy that helps them navigate markets and, of course, spending a lot of time on product research and to ensure that we on top of what we are delivering.
Going through all these processes and building the right set of complementary skills within the team that allow us to go to the marketplace, It has been an exciting journey. The client segmentation has also evolved and we do not consciously go after the ultra high net worth space. We do not go after the retail space in the private wealth business. Fintechs are attacking that but I think it has been a culmination where strategic discussions have evolved over a point of time.
How do you feel now that you have built the organisation and will be a listed company soon not.
Feroze Azeez : I feel very good because this business is built on passion on two levels. One is passion to educate clients — not just our clients. If we can spread education so that we as a country and investors in turn take more mathematical decisions in the path of investing that has been one passion.
The second is to tangibly influence those whom we can directly influence, those 6,000, 7,000 clients which we currently manage. So it feels very good. But this is the first step and there are miles to go before we sleep. In this journey we have accumulated several professionals over the last 10-15 years who have shared the same objective not just the self-monitoring objective but also shared the same passion and that is why coming to work every Monday morning has been so exciting. In the future, it will be even more so.
You guys have built this organisation painstakingly over the years and are among the top three now. Other than technology, what are the other levers that the top management is working on?
Amit Rathi: In the last five years, the growth in terms of the number of dollar millionaires is basically 14%, 15%, 16%. We are doubling every five years and so the macro opportunity itself is great. Within that, financial savings are growing in a great manner and as a business, we want to ensure two-three things. One is we are able to move correctly, to ensure that what we are executing currently we will do that the legit way — our research, our advisory all are very important.
The second is what can we do to train our RMs to ensure that their productivity levels across […]
source Anand Rathi Wealth started investing aggressively in technology five years back: Amit Rathi
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