How GoldenPi Revolutionized Fixed Income Investment In India

Abhijit Roy recalls struggling to figure out alternate fixed returns assets, which gave safe yet higher returns, for his parents’ investments. This was back in 2016, when he was working with Envestnet Yodlee, a leading provider of cloud-based financial technology services.

“The US fintech market was going through a disruption. Companies such as Venmo, Stride, Sqaure were already creating a stir in the market there,” says the IIT and IIM graduate. “Among Indian retail investors too, companies such as Zerodha, were disrupting the Indian fintech ecosystem. With this shift in economic trends, returns on traditional investments such as bank fixed deposits started steadily declining in India,” he further explains.

The many challenges Abhijit faced during that period while exploring worthwhile fixed income investment options for his parents went on to become key insights for his entrepreneurial venture - GoldenPi. Founded in 2017, GoldenPi is the first and leading aggregate platform for investing in bonds and debentures in India.

The Road Less Travelled
Along with co-founder Samir Baran Pratihar, Abhijit envisioned building a pioneering online platform for fixed income investments for individuals and corporates. “We wanted to change the way most Indians approached fixed income investments,” avers the CEO and Co-founder of GoldenPi.

Abhijit and Sameer were keen to build a platform for retail investors seeking fixed income investments beyond fixed deposits (FDs) and recurring deposits (RDs). While the Indian market for bonds and debentures was huge, it was restricted to financial institutions and high net-worth individuals (HNIs). “With GoldenPi, our endeavour was to make bonds and debentures easily accessible through our online platform to all retail investors, including largely risk-averse Indians,” says Abhijit.

GoldenPi was thus designed as an investment marketplace “as fulfilling as an Amazon and a Flipkart” for investors impacted by rapidly falling interest rates on traditional bank products. At present, it features Rs5000 crore of daily bonds and debentures inventory for investors and “the entry point is as little as Rs10,000”.

In less than five years, GoldenPi has revolutionized the fixed income investment space. “We offer investors the largest inventory access and best price discovery on a daily basis and with exceptional ease through our seamless online platform,” notes the Bengaluru-based entrepreneur.

GoldenPi’s partnership with over 16 financial institutions in debt market in the country ensures that clients get the best daily price discovery along with high liquidity. “Unlike other investment platforms, we do not hold our own proprietary books. Instead, we partner with a wide range of financial institutions, who have their proprietary books and want to sell to retail investors. We do an exhaustive price discovery to find out the best price for a particular bond to ensure that our investors benefit from the highest yield for a product,” explains Abhijit. In other words, the startup offers the most competitive rates in the market.

Bigger and Better
GoldenPi has built a SaaS version of its retail-first product for easy and cost-effective integration with third party platforms. This helps provide seamless access to retail investors looking to invest in secondary market bonds and debentures.

“Investments like bonds, exchange traded funds (ETF), debt funds and money market funds play an important role in building a balanced and resilient portfolio. They can serve as secondary income with high yielding interest,” says Abhijit.

Fixed income investments assure steady and fixed income, while preserving your capital. “They are a sound bet for everyone and not just for the conservative investor or for those seeking safe retirement investment avenues,” adds the entrepreneur who is looking to raise funds to fuel GoldenPi’s ambitious growth plans in the near future.
The startup’s future plans entail adding a variety of alternative and high-yielding fixed income investment products to its portfolio. “We are also working towards leveraging B2B growth opportunities,” informs Abhijit.

The long-term plan is to embrace a 360-degree approach to expand the company’s offerings and solutions. The goal is to meet the fixed income needs of individual investors as well as non-individual entities such as corporates and trusts.

(Article attributed to Abhijit Roy, CEO and Co-founder, GoldenPi)