Bridging the financial literacy divide

DSP Blackrock is helping more and more individuals to join the mutual fund investments by making it easier to invest by using digital technologies

BHAVESH LAKHANI

DSP GROUP

We built an online B2B portal for our distributors where they accept mutual fund applications by entering the PAN of a customer and automating workflow.

Backed by a strong economic growth of the country, the Indian stock market is soaring high. While thousands of people are making a fortune out of this stock market movement, a majority of the country is still struggling with financial literacy. This is where companies such as DSP Blackrock are trying to make a difference by becoming a reliable financial partner to millions of Indians. DSP Blackrock, a joint venture between 150-year-old Indian financial firm, DSP Group and the world's largest investment management firm, Blackrock, is a premier asset management company in the country.

One of the major challenges for DSP Blackrock has been to get more and more people under the mutual fund umbrella. The idea is that they start taking advantage of the stock market growth by opening an account with ease and begin investing. And it is not just the end customer that needs to find the process easy, even the distributors who engage with the customers should find it convenient.

Lakhani feels the only way the organisation could stay competitive was by going digital. “And it did help DSP Blackrock tremendously. The company has not only improved its revenues and profits but also gained customer mindshare. “We achieved top and bottomline improvements and better customer satisfaction scores after going digital,” puts in Lakhani.

DSP Blackrock has an experienced team of investment professionals with expertise in domestic capital markets and access to expertise from more than 700 investment professionals from over 135 investment teams at Blackrock worldwide. By becoming more accessible to the end customer, the company has been able to highlight its legacy and experience and establish itself firmly in the country.

Lakhani ensures that the cost of going digital was not astronomical by taking advantage of whatever was already available. “We tried to overlap wherever possible by upgrading the current infrastructure and where we could not, we adopted Cloud services to make it frictionless,” explains Lakhani.

However, this is just the first step by the company towards digital transformation. “Our aim is to move digital by, at least, 50 per cent more from where we stand today,” shares Lakhani.