In conversation with Prabhakar Tiwari, Chief Growth Officer (CGO), Angel One Ltd.

"Our digital capabilities have enabled us to expand our foothold" 

Along with strong gross addition of clients in Q1FY23, Angel One reported a robust 49.5 per cent YoY rise in consolidated net profit to ₹ 181.6 crore on a 44.7 per cent increase in total income to ₹ 686.5 crore. What factors are responsible for your consistent operational and financial outperformance?

Angel One’s consistent efforts to grow and penetrate deeper into the Indian market have led to our operational and financial success. With state-of-the-art technology, we have successfully scaled our client funnel, tremendously adding to our base. Our digital tools and technology are helping us penetrate untapped markets in Tier II and III and beyond cities and offering young investors, especially Gen Z and millennials, a seamless user experience. We offer our clients a bouquet of products and services for their wealth-creation needs.

Can you shed some light on your efforts to augment investment in your mobile platform, artificial intelligence, machine learning capabilities and other new technologies?

Technology is at the heart of operations at Angel One and engineering the company’s DNA. We are heavily invested both in technology and engineering at Angel One. We understand today’s users and how these tech-savvy investors prefer everything at the touch of a button. Their priority is to choose applications with a seamless experience. Hence, in the last 15 months, we have spent most of our time strengthening our technology systems, building redundancy, focusing on microservice and moving to fail-safe systems.
 

We also undertook efforts to make our systems rugged, applied fixes and set up monitoring and alerting systems for key engineering services, which enable us to respond to incidents quickly and maintain high SLAs. To provide a best-in-class experience, we are leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide a more personalised experience, available with our super app. The app is the epitome of integrating the best technologies into a platform, thus redefining the user experience.

How have you managed your customer acquisition cost (CAC) with volatile market sentiments?

We acquire clients through various channels, both digitally and through our widespread authorised person network. Since we acquire a large number of clients every month, their acquisition cost is one of the largest costs for a digital business like ours. It is imperative that our client targeting and acquisition strategies are well-planned, such that these clients become remunerative quickly. Here too, we have deployed AI tools which enable us to maintain our payback metrics despite volatile market sentiments.

How do you plan to leverage the burgeoning ecosystem by broadening your product portfolio? Also, what is your strategy for penetrating the untapped markets, specifically in Tier II, III and beyond cities?

Our long-term plan is to emerge as a one-stop solution for all the financial needs of our users. While broking is our mainstay product currently, we plan to introduce a wider product offering like mutual funds, insurance, etc. over time. This will position us better as we will cater to all the financial needs of our clients, thus expanding our relationship with them throughout their lifetime. Since most of our clients are new to the market, coming from Tier II, III and beyond cities, it is imperative that we build a platform that is simple to use. In addition, we also need to have a learning platform that helps our clients to gear up their understanding of the capital markets.

Our state-of-the-art products and services with digital capabilities have enabled us to expand our foothold and penetrate deeper into the untapped markets. Through our consistent efforts towards offering a seamless experience to our users, we are enabling them to make smart investment decisions in their wealth-creation journey. We are employing innovative marketing strategies to reach out to individuals across Tier II, III and beyond cities. Leveraging our social media presence, we have rolled out some user-centric campaigns to increase investing awareness. One of the most successful campaigns is our rebranding campaign, which connects easily with the youth and conveys our message of Angel One being a new-age digital player that understands the needs of today’s investors.

All our campaigns aim to communicate the ease, convenience and affordability of investing through Angel One. All our marketing campaigns are launched across digital platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, where our target audience, Gen Z and millennials, are present. Using vernacular language for content marketing is another factor that makes us relatable to our audience. All our initiatives have been well received, thus further increasing our client base.