Kotak's premium investment platform Cherry eyes 1M customers

MUMBAI: Kotak Mahindra Bank-arm Kotak Investment Advisors is eyeing to on-board 1 million customers on its premium investment offering app Kotak Cherry by March, having already enlisted 1.5 lakh customers since launch in June.

Cherry is a curated tech-led investment management platform designed to offer a holistic investing solutions to users on a digital app.

It offers investment solutions ranging from stocks, bonds, mutual funds, fixed deposits and national pension scheme to progressive investment opportunities like exchange traded funds, as a do-it-yourself (DIY) platform.

''Since the launch in June, we already have 1.5 lakh active clients. We plan to grow the client base to 10 lakh by the end of FY23 as we are growing around 30 per cent month-on-month,'' Srikanth Subramanian, the chief executive at Kotak Cherry, told PTI.

On the volume on the app, he said July saw almost 5,000 transactions and the cumulative value of the transaction on the app has crossed Rs 100 crore since the launch with the average financial holding being around Rs 27 lakh per customer.

He expects Cherry to have complete open architecture, wherein customers will be able to maintain their banking and broking relationships with the providers of their choice, still benefiting from the full power of the domain experience of the Cherry team and its curated services.

Subramanian said Cherry is the first platform to launch a mutual fund basket in the country as mutual funds are normally bought in bulk. ''So what we at Cherry do is to curate a set of mutual funds for our customers going by their investment appetite and trends of previous years, and offer them the best funds on a single platter.

''Soon we will be offering such a curated corporate bonds too,'' he said, adding though started off as a DIY platform, the objective is to offer highly curated products/asset class to customers.

Kotak Investment Advisors is a subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank, focusing on the alternate assets business. It was set up in early 2005 to bring a sharper focus to Kotak's alternate assets practice and has raised/managed/advised in aggregate over USD 5.1 billion across different asset classes, including private equity funds, realty funds, infrastructure funds, special situations fund, listed strategies and investment advisory.