Our co-founder Abhijit Roy shares the GoldenPi Technologies story and future growth plans in an exclusive interview with Outman Consulting. The interview is part of a special series on the major figures who’re revolutionising the Indian finance sector.
Here’s a snippet from the interview:
Why did you start GoldenPi Technologies?
We started on the 21st June 2017, inspired by developments in the financial markets.
In India the traditional, safe, investment space is bank fixed deposits.These have tended to give 9-10% returns. The cost of borrowing for businesses is therefore very high – it needs to pay for the interest rate on deposits.
As the Indian economy has developed this model has become unsustainable. By 2016 rates were at 6%. Given that the inflation itself stood at around 4%, there was hardly anything left back in bank deposits for the investors. Hence a large segment of investors were looking for a new place to put their money – somewhere safe but with better returns than bank deposits
We knew that the bonds and debentures markets could potentially meet this need, but there was a big problem: retail investors couldn’t access those markets.
Though the bond market is huge, it is a closed market with most of the business done over emails and phone calls between huge financial institutions. Investment is also complicated. Investors need to know the availability of certain bonds – there has to be a discovery mechanism of what is available today, and at which price.
There’s also a lot of paperwork involved. Know Your Customer (KYC) is complex, with lots of documents needing to be filled in.
So, we thought, why not create a tech platform to open up the bond market to everyone across the country – to anyone with an internet connection, mobile, laptop etc.
Why shouldn’t it be easy? Why can’t investing capital be as straightforward as buying from Amazon?
Read the complete interview here.
