Prabhakar Tiwari, Chief Marketing Officer at Angel Broking, is an industry expert with years of experience in multiple fields. Under his leadership, Angel Broking has seen rapid improvements in its digital maturity metrics and market share gains.
In this exclusive piece, Prabhakar writes about Angel Broking’s journey in 2020, the digital innovations they have adopted, about how he’ll always remember 2020 as the year when Angel Broking got a new ‘public’ entity, and more.
Read on.
The year of Angel Broking
Like people, brands also have a life of their own. They are conceived, born, and nurtured throughout their lives by everyone who gets associated with them – either as a parent or an extended family. I believe we get a fair idea of building a brand or an organization if we’ve raised a child ourselves.
We plan multiple things for our kids or for our family members. A few things pan out the way we think they would. A few things don’t. There are a lot of emotions involved in the entire process. But, at the end of the day, when we see our kids thriving and realizing their dreams, it brings a smile to our faces.
When we started 2020, we were already benefiting from the digital-first approach adopted by us over the yesteryears. We were taking the brand to new customer segments. We acquainted them with the Angel Broking edge that they enjoyed with us. It was only logical for them to hop on board: Prabhakar Tiwari
2020 was the year for Angel Broking Family. After all, it’ll always be remembered for the birth of Angel Broking as a new ‘public’ entity. Our family has just got bigger!
When we started 2020, we were already benefiting from the digital-first approach adopted by us over the yesteryears. We were taking the brand to new customer segments. We acquainted them with the Angel Broking edge that they enjoyed with us. It was only logical for them to hop on board.
For the uninitiated, Angel Broking is a full-service digital brokerage firm. We charge nothing for equity delivery trades. Intraday trades, F&O orders, and currency trades, on the other hand, are charged with a flat fee of Rs. 20 irrespective of the order size. In other words, an investment of Rs. 10 lakhs via other brokers (including purchase and sale) would cost an investor up to Rs. 10,000 for equity delivery and Rs. 1,000 for an intraday trade. With Angel Broking, these figures come down to ‘zero’ and Rs. 20. Similarly, a person can even purchase a penny stock as a delivery trade without paying a single rupee.
At Angel Broking, we have built an entire infrastructure of state-of-the-art services leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning alongside others. Some of these services include our investment engine ARQ Prime and our feature-intensive trading platforms such as SpeedPro and our mobile trading app.
Furthermore, during 2020, we have also developed Smart Money Platform which is a comprehensive guide to financial markets that extends free courses and certifications to retail investors, as well as Angel Amplifiers, which is the industry’s first Amplifiers platform exclusively for Social Media Influencers.
Further working on this front, we’ve recently launched SmartAPI, which adds to the capabilities of an investor. It extends advanced functionalities to startups, algo traders, and other fintech players to build innovative trading platforms and customized charts via API integration, thereby opening a new growth avenue for all market stakeholders.
Also, we were the first to offer UPI Auto-pay for Mutual Funds which significantly brings down the turnaround time of e-Mandate authentication for SIPs down to a few seconds. However, there is also something else that we are proud of. We concluded a successful IPO and got listed on October 5, 2020.
Owing to its technological edge, a simplified interface, and flat discount pricing, the digital-first broker has received an average monthly footfall of more than 1.4 lakh new customers in the current fiscal.
Happy Birthday, Angel Broking!
It feels like Angel has been born all over again following the IPO. I can feel a renewed energy amongst everyone associated with the brand. For an investor, the Angel Broking scrip has extended more than 10% returns in a matter of months. So, the ‘newborn’ has brought good luck and high spirits for everyone.
An IPO is a once-in-a-lifetime event for a brand. Everything that goes right remains etched in its history forever. If anything goes wrong, it is not any different. Any marketer or a professional will break out in a sweat if confronted with this thought. We were resilient. We just prepared ourselves well.
I will admit that 2020 was not easy for us. We typically operate in a fast-paced segment where every second counts. Various departments are literally at an arm’s distance from each other. You can see people pacing and even running with files, folders, or laptops every now and then. The lockdown shouldn’t have been easy on us. Thankfully, it wasn’t the case: Prabhakar Tiwari
Different departments were collaborating with different departments for a variety of reasons. All of us held the red herring prospectus as our bible. Nothing beyond it could be said or implied. It tested our ability as a team, and we came out brilliantly. We creatively marketed ourselves to different stakeholders and generated a lot of interest. Ultimately, our efforts materialized as a win-win situation for everyone.
I will admit that 2020 was not easy for us. We typically operate in a fast-paced segment where every second counts. Various departments are literally at an arm’s distance from each other. You can see people pacing and even running with files, folders, or laptops every now and then. The lockdown shouldn’t have been easy on us. Thankfully, it wasn’t the case.
Our technological edge enabled us to shift end-to-end operations digitally with considerable ease. A majority of our processes were already conducted online. It left us with only a few processes that needed the digital push.
On the whole, our end-to-end digital shift saved us a lot of time. I believe that the tech-driven approach made us a lot more efficient in everything we did, as is the case with tech-driven approaches. Now, in 2021 – a year of new beginnings, this tech-driven advantage is what we aim to empower all Indian traders and investors with. The best is yet to come.
