Personal Finance startup, Perfios has raised Series A from individual investors and here is a QnA with the team on personal finance business, monetization plans and more.
The investors who have bet big on the Perfios proposition are all well known industry czars with a penchant for investing and entrepreneurship and include P.S Pai (Formerly of the Murugappa Group and Wipro), V.Chandrasekaran (formerly of Wipro, iGate and Aztecsoft), Dr. Ashish Gupta (Helion Venture Partners) and A.G Muralikrishnan (Ujwal Management Services) .
Qn: Personal Finance Market – Your competition is creating the market for you. But at the same time, cash is your #1 competition. How do you plan to penetrate the market?
Ans: You are right when you say cash being our biggest competitor as it becomes very difficult for any software to capture these transactions unless manually fed. To solve such difficulties we provide various options in which transactions can be captured along with auto fetch from financial institutions. For example – Mutual fund statements can be uploaded directly on to Perfios or it can even be emailed straight from the user’s personal Inbox! Along with this we also have also excel support for any past data upload, be it cash, Mutual Funds or equity transactions. Our idea is to give enough options to the users for any kind of activity, after all every user is not the same!
Qn: In general, the TAM [Total Addressable Mkt] for personal finance service over Internet is too small for India. DO you plan to reach out to other devices (like mobile) or grow the ARPU? Do share the details.
Ans – We do agree with your statement but with the entire personal finance market untapped it’s a good platform to start with. Having said that, we are also looking into expanding onto mobile platform. We already have a tie up with Samsung for their App store in India, would be looking into more such tie-ups. This clearly shows our intentions to grow beyond the traditional web and look at mobile as the additional growth engine!
Qn: Monetization plans – how do you plan to monetize the service?
Ans: Well, the service is free for end users and we have multiple ways of generating revenue. A few of them are –
- ‘MyClients’ (An application for Wealth Management firms, CA’s, Independent Financial Advisors etc) – we already have a few paying customers in this segment.
- Freemium Model: we may take the route of a Freemium model where we may come out with more advanced features which would be paid (only for such advanced features and on a subscription basis). But be rest assured that the application as you see now would always be free. We may also come out with a few value added services where the end users will pay for utilizing those services. We are working on these models and will be deploying them soon.
- Ad Model – Once the user traction picks up, we may also go with the traditional ad-model way (for free users)
Qn: What will you use the funding for?
Ans: The money will be used primarily for marketing and team expansion.
Qn: Perfios is 2 years old and is probably the first co. to start in personal finance space. Tell us about the challenge you have faced in convincing people to use a service like this, especially the concern over sharing one’s bank details with a third party svc.
Ans– You are so very right, it actually took a lot of effort to make the concept popular in the market, evangelization was the primary activity in the initial days! We faced the biggest challenge in convincing users as to how secure Perfios is and how providing security and privacy to our users has always been our top most priority. For example – all we need to know from a user to get his/her account created is an email id. That’s all.
Over and above this, we do NOT even store any user credentials (Financial Institutions id and passwords) on our servers;. While evangelization and constant reinforcement of security/privacy practices help to some extent, there is so substitute to great execution (of those concepts) and delighted customers – that is the phase we are in now and hope to leverage the happy customers experiences to grow further
Qn. Series A from Individual Investors – defines convention. Why did you choose this route?
Ans: For our second round of funding we were discussing with a few VC firms and individual investors. While there was sufficient interest from the VC firms as well, we decided to move forward with the individual investors, as the existing angel investors wanted to participate in the new round as well and we did not really have room for the participation of a VC firm.
Congratulations to the Perfios team.
What was the total amount of funds raised in this round? Any news/updates on that?
How u differentiate urself with artha money ?
Does the user needs to share all the passwords like for Banks, Mutual Funds etc with perfios ? Then it will be a huge risk
Perfios is unique this way – they do not store any passwords in their servers, and the users do not need to disclose them to Perfios. The desktop app stores them locally, gathers transaction data over the net. This transaction data alone can be uploaded to Perfios for storage, analysis, sharing with your advisors etc.
Pretty neat concept.
Interesting App,inspired by Mint.
Its a combination of moneycontrol portfolio tracker and rupee x with some added features.
Challenges are
*Small TAM (Wealth managers, CA, IFAs)
*Complicated interface will restrict mass adoption by end users.
*I don’t see any alternate revenue models evolving (Freemium and ad is unlikely to be substantial)
Opportunities are in the online wealth advisory and financial planning domain.
Agree that the target audience for Wealth managers, CAs etc. is small – however they could be leveraged to add credibility and value-addition to the marketing effort.
The interface does not appear too complicated – the early adopters seem to have appreciated it well.
Agree that the freemium model might not fly, but the ad model has good potential – better than traditional ad models due to ability to target at a very fine granularity (based on transaction info).
Perfios is trying be the mint.com for india. India is a different market though. Lets see how things go for them, best of luck to perfious team.
Firdt of all congratulation to the Perfios team on the website, first indian site similar to mint or yodlee.
Registered myself on the website of http://www.Perfios.com, and am not really happy with it, i have a account with yodlee and it works great, i can add almost any of my accounts. Perfios is still under development and has a long way to go, i am disappointed cause i read spoke to a rep over the phone and he told me that the site is under construction from past two years, however i still don’t see that it has options of all the insurance/loans etc… they still need to work a lot.
I would suggest users to use yodlee as of now till Perfios is completely developed. Yodlee also has a great service, they usually reply to query within 24 hours.
all said about Perfios , i am still happy that someone in india has started this, so best of luck to the Perfios team.
One can also register on http://moneycenter.yodlee.com and integrate all banking / credit card/ demat accounts from indian institutions.
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I have been using Perfios for a month now, and I’m impressed. Here is my take:
1) For a first Indian account aggregation service, their implementation is pretty good.
2) Their list of supported sites (banks, Mutual funds, credit cards and Demat/Loan accounts) is pretty good. So far I have been able to add all my accounts.
3) Ability to upload PDF statements from CAMS (MF Distributor) is amazing.
4) Their support has been well too, responded to me in 12hrs when I reached them. Also auto-detected an issue with my account and fixed it without me raising a concern — SUPER!
Some pain points:
1) The UI looks primitive, and takes some getting used to. The interface is tiled so you can navigate easily and is probably the best approach, but being an avid internet user, the UI does not appeal to me. Probably bad for marketing.
2) There is no one centralized place to add/delete/edit/manage your accounts, you need to go to each category to do that.
3) No place to look at what all sites(FIs) are supported (or I missed it).
Kudos to the team, I work in PFM space, so I know what a pain it is to do this aggregation, and they have done this pretty nicely.
Goodluck Guys!