AdvisorKhoj is a website that brings together investors, distributors
and AMCs. Its founder Pradip Chakrabarty shares his plan on his new venture
in an interview with Pallabika Ganguly.
What is advisorkhoj.com?
Advisorkhoj
is an on-line directory to help investors locate financial advisors and
distributors across the
country. The idea is to create a one-stop portal
where investors can search for all types of financial advisors
such as
investment advisors, insurance, tax planning, financial planning, shares
and commodities, etc. The portal will help advisors to grow their
clientele. The beta version of the portal has been launched and it will be
fully operational in two weeks.
The portal is our attempt to
bring the three stake holders – investors, advisors and manufacturers, on
to a single platform. The advisors can propagate and promote their
business, manufacturers can showcase their
concepts and products and
investors can avail these services and products through a credible
financial
advisor or distributors in their neighborhood.
What prompted you to launch such
portal?
For
the past few years, financial advisors are facing a lot of regulatory
challenges. Moreover, the market has
also been volatile for quite some
time.
Today media portrays, most of them as
commission earning agents. Therefore, I felt the need to make it clear
to
media and investors that the little financial penetration that exists in
the country is only due to the financial
advisors. So, I launched a website
which showcases the expertise of licensed financial advisors.
How will it benefit
distributors?
This is the only virtual platform that
is meant to help distributors to reach masses. By listing on the site,
distributors benefit in several ways:
- Advisors
can list complete range of services offered by them, like from preparing
PAN Cards to financial planning, will writing and so on.
- In
addition, advisors can talk about their services and list their
achievements in their‘bio page’ for the investors to see.
- Most
importantly, it will create a ‘pull’ as the investor will search the
advisors and seek their services.
What is your business model?
Our business model is based on
subscription fee.
The basic registration ‘Madhyam’
service is free for advisors where an advisor can display his education
qualifications, experience, team size and office photograph. But
advisors can only get access to investor’s contact details as well as
upgrade their profile by adding investor’s experience video by availing any
of the three paid service – ‘Uttam’ for Rs 499 per annum (p.a), ‘Atyuttam’
for Rs 1499 p.a. and ‘Sarvottam’ for Rs 4999 p.a. Each level of
subscription will entitle the advisor to a different set of value added
services.
How can advisors register on the
portal?
Advisors can register themselves in
three ways:
- Online
registration – advisors can go to our portal – www.advisorkhoj.com and
register online. For mutual fund advisors a special link has been created…
the moment a mutual fund advisor enters his/her ARN No. a verification code
will be sent to his/her mobile. The advisor only needs to enter the
verification code and he/she is registered!
- Telephonic
registration - financial advisors can call on 08880009939 or give ‘missed
call’ on our helpline number 08067730036 and our call centre team will get
in touch with them and help them to register on our portal.
- Write
to us with their complete profile details at register@advisorkhoj.com
How will it benefit investors?
Oh, that’s a really a good question and
I would like to show you certain statistics. Google analytics show that
more than half million Indians, on a monthly basis, search for advisors who
offer investment products, tax advice, financial planning, mutual funds and
other financial products.
But, investors end-up seeing links of
some Indian banks or large corporate distributor, offices of mutual fund
and insurance companies. Hardly any IFAs contact details are visible in the
search results. Our aim is to bring the portal on the first page of such
searches so that all advisor contacts are easily available to investors.
Investors get to choose advisors and
compare advisors on the basis of experience, awards and qualifications.
Investor can also post their queries which will be answered by our expert
advisors.
To connect to the advisor the investor
can do a City, area and the service or a product based search for the best
results. Our administrative team will help the investor to instantly
connect to specified advisors through sms and email. After availing the
advisor’s service he/she can also rate and review the service provider.
What are your other plans for
advisorkhoj?
Clearly, our plan is to bring all three
stake holders on to one platform and our mission is to take financial
advisors and distributors to the masses. This mission will not be
accomplished unless we bring all the current active advisors (the number
would be approx 500,000 across product and service categories) on our
portal, enroll new set of advisors from B-15 cities and conduct investment
awareness program in tier II and III cities and rural areas. Therefore, all
our plans will revolve and evolve around these things apart from our plans
to execute certain completely out of the box ideas.
When will the portal be operational?
We have done a soft launch of the
portal so that advisors can register from next week. Once we have
registered advisors across one hundred cities, we will popularize the
portal among investors.
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nice post ....sharing information related to financial planning advice
ReplyDeleteThank you so much sir!! Please keep in touch.
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