This Startup Is Providing Innovative Solutions To Financial Market Complications : StockEdge

• ByAyushi Ray     |    June 29, 2021

“In a startup it is all about the team members, a founder has little role other than just initiating the venture. “ In an insightful interview to the Startup Story, Mr. Vineet Patawari, Co-Founder of Elearnmarkets & StockEdge said. Kolkata based startup, Elearnmarkets & StockEdge was set up with a straightforward motto of providing ‘Innovative Solutions to Financial Market Complications’ Their success story makes us believe that without the far-sighted vision of founder bridging such a latent gap in the financial market education industry, would not have been possible.

Looking Ahead Of Time

 Even before completing his MBA, Vineet had decided to start up a new venture of his own along with some of his friends. Despite being an MBA grad from IIM Indore, he shunned his campus job offer and followed his passion and chose to streamline and structure the journey for individuals who want to make a career in the financial markets. A career in financial markets is on the wishlist of a number of students but very few actually make it basically because of lack of proper training in this field. Bridging this gap between demand for trained professionals in financial markets and availability of trained professionals is what gave Vineet, along with his two partners Vivek and Vinay the inspiration to start a unique online education platform. Recalling those days, he says, “In case the startup didn’t work out, I had my degree to fall back upon.”

Vineet Patawari, Vivek Bajaj and Vinay Pagaria each with an expertise in the field of finance  were no strangers to the unstructured and fragmented nature of the financial market education segment and it was in 2014 that they came together to launch Elearnmarkets to streamline and structure the journey for individuals who want to make a career in the financial markets.

 Industry Need

 “When I was in college, there was no proper place to go and learn about finance.” says Vineet. Finance being a complex subject, most people are hardly aware of the functioning of the Stock Market. And those who know it, they want to present it as a far more complex subject as it has a lot of money involved. “We wanted to democratize it”  and that is why he thought of creating his presence in this segment. Till date, the Elearnmarkets has a million registered users and its android app is downloaded almost half a million times.

Vineet continues, “When you have faced the problem yourself, you try to dig deeper and find a solution.”  He explains that there are basically four steps of finance – “Learn, Analyze, Collaborate and finally Invest”. It is important to learn the ABC of the stock market before investing. Here comes Elearnmarkets which is a unique interactive online education platform which is committed to taking practical oriented finance training to the next level. “We use technology to spread knowledge; our courses make use of high-end and interactive Learning Management System. We also provide a platform to market experts and enable practical experience sharing with the learners. This helps us create a large pool of learners who are well trained, skilled and a perfect fit to fill the manpower requirement of the industry.”

It has courses that are certified by the National Stock Exchange (NSE Academy), Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX), and National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange Limited (NCDEX). This gives credibility and helps individuals to achieve their career goals. The course topics range from fundamental and technical analysis of financial markets, to derivatives trading, financial modeling, currency, and commodity markets.

Further, the Elearnmarkets founders wanted to provide a platform to market experts, which would enable the sharing of practical experiences with learners. This would spawn a large pool of skilled learners who are well trained that can cater to industry needs.

In 2016, they launched StockEdge with a wide range of self-research and analysis tools in order to make stock analytics simpler. It was initially started as a sidekick to help learners get structured data of listed companies along with cutting edge analytics. But StockEdge has now turned into a full-fledged equity and mutual fund research tool with the app garnering over 2 million downloads. With a rating of 4.4, this is the highest-rated finance app in this category in India.

Now in 2021, on a combined level (Elearnmarkets and StockEdge) saw a threefold jump in new users/month in comparison to pre-covid levels. They have 2.3 million unique registered users. These figures truly speak in favor of widespread acceptance of financial markets as a part/full-time career option.

The USP

“First of all, in the space where we are operating, there are very few people who are functioning in a structured way. This industry is extremely fragmented and there are individuals who are training people.” says the CEO.

There have been scams and all other problems related to finance in the past, so people generally don’t have faith in financial planners or market experts who can train them because there always have been vested interests. What Elearnmarkets has done is bring credibility into the system- the fintech ecosystem through the due diligence of every trainer before they onboard them to the company and then they have revenue sharing with them, so it’s a win-win situation for everyone. At Elearnmarkets, they try to keep the prices as reasonable as possible, so that it is accessible and economical for every buyer and every student who wants to benefit from their services. Today, they have a team of 160 dedicated people who are working hard to simplify financial markets for Indian retail investors, so that they can make better financial decisions.

Journey So Far

Elearnmarkets has now become the biggest financial market eLearning platform in India with over 60,000 minutes of recorded content and continuous live classes. They have trained over a million verified registered users via Elearnmarkets, and with certification courses from NSE Academy, MCX, NCDEX . In this niche segment, Elearnmarkets hosts more than 100 experts and 200+ courses, and assists thousands of students with placement & internships. The courses cover all aspects of the financial market and provide training at an affordable price in 7 languages other than English including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and so on.

They have also trained lakhs of students for free via their free learning section in their website. They have an entire section dedicated to free courses, webinars, videos and text-based modules which is popularly known as ELM School. They have a Youtube channel with 520K+ subscribers which creates high quality content on a regular basis.

Content And Feedback

Vineet further tells the Startup Story, “We have mostly utilized the power of content marketing. In a way, we are a content company. We have a huge range of content free of cost that brings in a number of eager learners and from there, a portion of learners upgrade to premium/certified courses to help them in their job, career and increase profitability while they are themselves investing.” Apart from their free learning section and YouTube videos, they also have an active blog which is extremely useful for learners and helps Elearnmarkets to bring in new users to their website. Therefore, the cost of acquiring users is low since it is a content-based website. “And we want to keep it that way.” Vineet adds.

The team at Elearnmarkets & StockEdge is extremely alert on their social media handles and as a result they are always one step ahead by taking their user feedback into account. They get the idea on what to do next, and exactly what people want from them right now by analyzing the comments on their Facebook, Instagram, Blog and YouTube. Also, it is a great way of connecting with their users. They also have instilled a feedback pop-up on their website so to know both the positive and negative aspects of their website from a user POV.

Funding

The founders have invested Rs 4.5 crore in Elearnmarkets to date. It has also got seed capital from a financial services firm in Kolkata, and a pre-Series A round in 2018 with investments from market experts like Ramesh Damani, Ajay Sharma, and Dinesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of Indiamart.com. The external investments are close to Rs 3.5 crore. The revenues more than doubled from Rs 7 crore in FY 2020 to Rs 14 crore in 2020-21.

Future Plans

Vineet says, “We want to become an integrated solution provider for individual investors in India in the domain of personal financial management. We started with knowledge offerings because it is the core DNA of our organization. Through knowledge, we are helping the users to connect with us and consume our various forms of content like video, analysis tools, learning tools etc.”

They aim to make retail participants become independent decision-makers, and so they are looking to expand their research and analytics division by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. They also plan to build a community of like-minded people so that they can interact and learn from each other.

“In the next 18 to 24 months we plan to expand our roots in the tier-2 & tier-3 cities as well as abroad. We aim to increase our current combined user base of 1.8 million to 5 million.” continues Vineet.

Vineet’s Advice To Future Entrepreneurs

“Nothing is easy in life, so you have to stick around, which is more important than passion, than idea. If you stick around enough time, you will find the right approach. Do not get blinded by the glamour of startups and being an entrepreneur. Do not glamourise entrepreneurship too much. Perseverance is very important and you have to have better communications with team members and your objectives and aim absolutely ready.”

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