Investments are a promise to growing money and a security. But first time investors grapple with the complexities that arise in the process. That’s got to do more with the jargons associated with them and the inability of companies to demystify them for eager investors at times. But HDFC Securities’ philosophy of enhancing customer experience at every step has found them a solution.So was the case for HDFC Securities too as 90% of the customers acquired were first time investors. The investors eventually wanted to graduate from a fixed deposit in a bank to an investment asset class, investing into mutual funds, equities and other asset classes. But the task at hands was to dejargonise investments for them.First time investors, especially millennials, may grapple with the complexities of the mutual fund investments. HDFC Securities’ virtual assistant Arya helps demystify investments in the form of conversations for them.
Fortunately the investors had a reference point to model the investment conversation on and wanted it to be as simple as an ecommerce transaction.
“When they go on an online retail site, they know that they have to buy a shirt of ZZ brand for an xxx amount of price.. Similarly, our investors told us ‘that I have Rs. 10,000 or Rs. 50,000. I want to invest in equities for the given time horizon. I don’t know where to invest. You suggest and help me understand. Don’t make me download an app or visit a web platform just for investing my money. We wanted the investments to be as simple as making an e-commerce transaction or a conversation,’” says Nandkishore Purohit, Head-Digital Business and Strategy. At this juncture, HDFC Securities sought the help of AI and machine learning.
Investment decisions as conversations
Today with Arya, an investor can invest into mutual funds. “Soon he will be able to invest into equities and apply for an IPO in a conversational mode,” Purohit says.
Once you are familiar with basic investing and you want to graduate from investing in a conversational mode to a more advanced investing through various platforms like mobile app or other web platforms you would want to learn about the market, terminologies of the marker and advanced trading techniques. “Arya has an onboarding solution which helps you to graduate from here to there. So, Arya helps customer right from basics of investment till he/she is able to onboard completely as a matured investor,” he explains.
The technology at play is the natural language processing, powered by both Stanford and Google. There are two kinds of things which can be done with Arya. One is the FAQs and other are transactions.
“For FAQs it is pretty simple, we have our own customer care center. So, we know the frequently asked questions which our customers enquire at customer care. Those were my straight forward use cases that I had for the FAQs. Transactions for the first-time investor would like to invest in. He would like to park money in mutual funds. So that was my straight forward use case. He would like to buy simple equity products. He doesn't want the complexities of the advanced trading like intraday, margin orders, etc,” Purohit says. “We gave him a simple option of cash investment, that was another use case. Third use case is IPO is one of the major product where the customer opens the demat account and start the investment journey in equity market. This is how we build use cases using NLP and Machine Learning.”
Benefits are a plenty
Purohit says that the business benefits are in the form of the leads generated. Also, Arya has solved about more than 50,000 FAQs for the customers, since its inception now. ”Apart from that we have built another revenue generation stream for my mutual fund AUM through Arya. Soon will be soon launching equities and IPOs,” he says.
Additionally, HDFC Securities could cater to one of the niche but the fastest growing customer segment--millennials. “Millennials don't want too many apps on their mobile. They want everything in a jiffy and in the form of conversation, because they are born and brought up in the era of conversation. And they want their transactions to happen at the time of their and platform of their choice,” Purohit opines.
Another smart move was the make Arya live on Facebook messenger. The philosophy was as millennials spend majority of their time on social media and while chatting with a friend may get to know good stock ideas. Through the Facebook messenger one can chat with Arya and invest.
Purohit has explored another avenues as well like Google Assistant, Alexa and twitter. The idea is to be present on the customers’ choice of platform. “I can never be the platform of their choice and what was happening since I was not there, I was forcing people to come on my platform and make transactions, which is the biggest friction. So rather than asking customers to come on my platform and make a transaction, Arya is helping me to be present on those platforms where my customers are already present, and consuming lot of content,” Purohit explains.
And as the entire decision-making process starts on those platforms, Arya helps close the decision as transactions in the form of conversations there.