Intro: Arun Chaudhry, head-Online Business & Product Development, Broking & Distribution, Motilal Oswal Securities, explains how technology has helped create a transformation in the company:
Motilal Oswal Securities has seen a huge transformation on the digital front over the last 18-24 months. From being a small part of its business strategy, technology is now one of the key business drivers for the company.
Success In 3 Quarters
Arun Chaudhry
The focus of Motilal Oswal’s digital strategy for 2017-18 was to ensure that its end customers enjoy a seamless and personalized experience while transacting across any of its channels – mobile app, web portal, desktop application, or interacting with its sales and advisory representatives. The company has seen giant leaps in terms of technology offerings not just for customers but for its business partners, employees and other stakeholders across the business in 2017-18. The company has launched several unique, habit sensitive platforms and products keeping in mind the specific needs of clients.
Arun Chaudhry, head – Online Business & Product Development, Broking & Distribution at the company claims that the company is the only one in the industry to have dedicated platforms for traders and investors providing equal convenience to both the customer types. “This has proven to be very successful with the newly launched MO Trader App getting close to 1 lakh downloads in a very short span of time. The combined online turnover is now in excess of 50% with mobile being the fastest growing segment at more than double the growth over the past year,” he elaborates.
In the last financial year, Motilal Oswal launched 4 AI-powered robo based products. ACE Cash & ACE Derivatives are unique algo-based advisory portfolios with 100% automated execution for equity and derivatives. TIP (Target Investment Plan) is one of its kind end to end goal-based MF investing platform to help clients achieve their varied requirements eventually helping them achieve their key life goals. Robo Wealth is a 100% robo based custom portfolio modeling tool with personalized insights, multi-language and instant execution capabilities. Me-Gold is industry’s first 100% online gold buying/selling product with 999.99 purity gold that can be delivered at customer’s doorstep.
All these unique products have met with stupendous success in the past 3 quarters both in terms of business generation and recognition from clients and business partners alike, says Chaudhry. “With this solid foundation, we will now be focusing on further sharpening our existing platforms and products to make them more and more personalized and relevant for our end users, which will be aided through better understanding of customer needs via Big Data Analytics, along with rolling out more industry-leading products, catering to our client’s investment and financial needs,” he adds.
Richer User Experience
Being in the broking and distribution space, Motilal Oswal realized that client’s money is of paramount importance and hence all its energies are channelized to understand their needs better to build wealth. “Technology gives a B2C company like us a huge operational advantage and helps us achieve massive scale at a much lower cost,” says Chaudhry, adding: “Another key role played by technology is to ensure 100% accuracy of information passed on to the clients, which is extremely important given the sensitive role we play in managing our client’s money. Digital platforms also give us insights into very important behavioral traits of the clients which bring us in a position to make the user experience richer and relevant at all points of time. We are now moving from a B2C to a B2I model wherein through artificial intelligence and robo based tools, we will be in a position to identify every customer’s need and address it before he/she even realizes it.”
Online Business Jumps
Motilal Oswal is highly focused in terms of influencing online as a ‘way of life’ for all its business partners. The company ensures that every stakeholder is given a flavor of its technology prowess in the very first week of being part of the MOSL family. The engagement with its business partners happens at multiple levels through a whole lot of initiatives in the form of workshops, seminars, communications and regular engagement and feedback process. According to Chaudhry, all these initiatives are focused only on one agenda – how is online beneficial for you? The company’s teams travel throughout the country to educate existing and prospective customers and at the same time conduct online webinars to make sure that the point of ‘being online’ is well entrenched into the minds of its business partners. The company is growing at a very fast pace with more than 55% of the turnover now coming from online (trades initiated by clients) which was around 31% in FY 15-16. The absolute online turnover over the period has increased by more than 260%.
Regular engagement with customers also gives the company a double advantage – getting insights into the minds of partners as well as hand hold them in their transition towards digitization, giving the comfort they need to grow the business.
Analytics With Marketing
Adoption of big data and analytics has completely changed the way Motilal Oswal operates its business. In terms of product development, analytics is the core in analyzing most frequent and least traversed user journeys that help the company in making decisions related to product improvement. Chaudhry says: “Usage of analytics has also helped us in providing personalized information to our end users when they touch base with us in any form (offline or online) and even cross marketing relevant products to them based on their needs and behavior. Moreover, with integration of analytics with our marketing, we are also able to communicate with our end users through the most preferred medium at their most preferred time. All these changes have helped us double our online business in the last 12 months.”
The company has a 200-member IT team.
Goal Based Platform
Motilal Oswal has been constantly evolving, not just developing new products, but in employing cutting edge means of engagement. It is already in fairly advanced stages of employing mass engagement mediums and automation in this field, the idea being to reach out to the right audience at the right time with the right agenda.
Says Chaudhry: “We are in a position to intelligently profile anyone the moment he visits our website till the time he is active with us. We have developed very specific and highly relevant parameters to understand his need/nature so that we are able to give him a personalized experience. We understand his most preferred medium of communication, trading behavior/preferences, risk appetite, lifestyle interests and much more.”
All this information is then used to provide relevant offerings and recommendations not only at an individual but at a holistic family level to the customer, and alert him on any deviation in his investment pattern or risk level. “Our robo-based portfolio restructuring tool picks up the client’s profile and gives insights on what modifications a customer needs to make to his investment to achieve better returns. Our goal-based investing platform, TIP, also gives profile-based recommendations which can help clients achieve their long-term goals through wealth creation,” adds Chaudhry.
Moreover, the entire customer journey is synced across the company’s platforms as well as its offline channels to ensure he gets a seamless experience, thus resulting in higher customer satisfaction and delight.
Presence On Social Media
Motilal Oswal’s TIP campaign was ranked the top trending tweet by Campaign India. ‘TheOnlyTIP’ on 24 July 2017 was one of the most talked about topic on Twitter. TIP Launch video received 22 lakh views on Face Book, 18 lakh views on YouTube and 2.58 lakh views on Twitter. TIP digital campaign on other platforms generated 5.22 crore impressions and 2.86 lakh clicks, while TIP posts received over 3.8 lakh engagement on Face Book and 21,000 engagements on Twitter.
The company’s presence on social media is extremely strong. Says Chaudhry: “Our overall social media followers witnessed a 86% yoy growth with more than 284% growth in YouTube audience. We have been consistently on No 1 position in cross platform social engagement across Face Book/Twitter/YouTube with 17.65 lakh engagements (52% share of total category engagements). To answer all our consumer queries, we created the industry’s customer service chatbot – MO Genie. This has handled over 6.7 lakh queries in the past year and has been awarded the Banking Frontiers Finnoviti 2018 award.”
In online investing, personalization is the key. Chaudhry says the company’s data-based understanding of customer psychology helped it identify 2 investor psyches – long-term investors and short-term traders. The company then created an Investor vs. Trader campaign on TV channels like CNBC TV18 along with other channels such as social media as well as online banners and customer emailers. “This campaign identified the differences between traders and investors and the need for separate apps for each. This campaign also included a separate initiative for our Smart Watch app (winner of Finnoviti Award by Banking Frontiers Magazine),” adds Chaudhry.
