Dial a Bank - A Justdial for your banking needs
Q. What do you understand by Mutual funds
A. Mutual fund Investments are subjects to market risks, Please read the offer documents carefully before investing.
If this is all you know about mutual funds, it is not your fault. This is how finance products are designed to be.
I do not know of a single entrepreneur who has a life insurance or a health insurance or any other kind of financial safety net to fall back in difficult times. First reason being the fact that they don't have enough time to research all the policies to get the best one for them. Also when you approach any bank, every bank says they are the best out there thus giving you the narcissistic opinion instead of the honest opinion. Another reason is that most of the entrepreneurs will find it better to invest the money in their startup rather than paying premiums for Insurance policies.
While it is difficult to convince an entrepreneur to invest his money somewhere else apart from his startup, Dial-a-Bank helps with the problem of choosing the best solution for your needs. Dial-a-bank as they claim, is India's first financial helpline which helps people to choose financial products be it a mutual fund, loan or any kind of policy from over 90 banks, 40 mutual funds and 20 insurance companies.
You can call their helpline number - 60011600, which is present across 18 cities, to get a sound and unbiased advice if you are looking for a loan or an investment plan or anything else related to banks.
Gaurav Khurana, who has worked at senior roles at various leading banks including Citi bank and ING apart from MNC's like Xerox sensed an opportunity in this field and launched Dial-a-Bank in 2011. When he saw that bank products are sold through third parties who are not qualified and do not have the complete in-depth knowledge about the product.
Gaurav started his career with Xerox where he helped them launch network devices in India and post that he joined Citi where he helped the bank set up their first branch in Chandigarh. He was also the one of youngest VP at Citi at the age of 30. Gaurav moved to ING in 2008 when it was ranked 8th by Fortune Global along with his previous Asia pacific CEO at Citi who also moved to ING.
Roadblocks for starting up
There were multiple roadblocks while starting up like setting up a voice based business for bank products was a complex task and what took time is getting different components together including getting the phone platform active in various cities along with getting partnerships with large banks.
On talking about tackling these roadblocks, Gaurav says:
"The good thing for an entrepreneur is that all mental roadblocks are broken the day the umbilical cord of a cushy job gets snapped. You have to put your head down and start to build each block of the business. It’s like playing Lego once again in life. "
Competition
Some of the other players operating in the similar space are BankBazaar.com, PolicyBazaar.com, ApnaPaisa.com, InsurancePandit.com. But none of them provides voice based solutions for financial products and this is where dial a bank has a huge advantage as it is easier for customers to get their doubts and queries sorted on a realtime basis with a person rather than talking to a chat box on some portal.
Being positive about competition, Gaurav says:
"The beauty of competition is that it makes you run faster, jump higher, work harder and fight stronger. Yes, we have had tough competition from old and large players in this space, some of who are funded and therefore difficult to beat down immediately and that’s been a challenge for us. I personally believe that the size of the market is large enough and will permit multiple players to operate and serve different client segments. "
Talking about numbers, In the last two years they have been operational, they have served over 180K customers so far across their entire product range. Dial a bank claims to get around 3200 visitors each day out of which around 500 fill the inquiry form and over 150 calls each day.
Lessons
On talking about his key lessons which helped him in his journey, Gaurav says -
1) Stay patient through the journey.
2) Remain passionate about your idea.
3) Come to work each day with more energy than you left with, the previous day.
4) Don’t sell what you have, sell what your clients need.
We think being a voice based search and consulting platform they have a huge advantage over plain comparison tables when you can't understand the difference between bluechips and discovery funds or basic Life Insurance and ULIP plans, and this is where Dial a Bank scores as they present you the options without jargon.
Visit Dial-a-Bank here.
McDowell’s No. 1 Platinum respects Leaders like Gaurav who had the courage to follow their passion and solve a real problem and and also encourages more people to follow their dreams and join them in their unconventional journey.