Doling out financial wisdom with keen focus on Southern markets

Chennai

IndianMoney.Com, a company that provides free personal finance advice and education to consumers over the phone while buying any kind of financial products, has completed 10 years in the business.

With a revenue model based on lead generation for insurance service providers, the Bengaluru-based concern says a significant chunk of its user base is concentrated in the south Indian states including Tamil Nadu. A top official of the company talks about growth plans going forward.

People interact with their money by earning it, spending it, paying for goods and services using it, investing it and borrowing it. Unfortunately, as much as 60 per cent of India’s population falls under the unbanked or ignored category. And this is where Sudheer CS, the founder of IndianMoney.com sees an opportunity. Having drawn lessons from the plight of a rickshaw driver who invested his life savings in a ‘ULIP’ plan only to discover it was a regular insurance plan, Sudheer embarked on a mission to help turn working and middle-class Indians into financially literate individuals. And 10 years ago, he went on to incept IndiaMoney.com.

He says, “We run a call-centre based business, but we never cold-call as customer (which is industry parlance for bulk or spam tele calling). The 24,000 to 25,000 calls that we receive every day are from prospects keen on turning their financial wellness around. The clientele comprises every section of society – from the economically independent millennials to the daily wage earners. The top markets for us include Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi, which along with a few other cities account for about 60 per cent of the calls that we receive.”

The revenue model employed is one of generating leads from insurance companies. “We generate close to 5,000 leads every day i.e. prospects who would possibly purchase an insurance or an investment product. The service providers in turn pay a commission to IndiaMoney.com for each lead – essentially compensating the company for access to a wider market of customers,” Sudheer explains.

The company had been funded an amount of $3 mn (Rs 22 crore) by SRI Capital earlier in January this year. The investment has been channelled into aggressive modes of expansion with the founder expecting the daily call numbers to touch 1 lakh over the next year or two. He says, “We have been profitable since the past four years and have been growing 100 per cent Y-o-Y. The long-term goal is to set up an incubation centre for fintech start-ups based out of India that have a relevance to our type of business.”