Finance veterans from IIM-Bangalore launch Scripbox to make investing in MFs simpler

Friday January 04, 2013 , 3 min Read

Indians have a tendency to save but not many invest. Only 2% of Indians invest! The case is reversed in say, the US. People save less but invest the most of it. And this is where Robert Kiyosaki’s “Make money work for you” philosophy comes into the picture. Thanks to inflation, money lying idle is losing its value naturally. And hence, 'invest' should be the mantra.

While fixed deposits, gold and realty still dominate investments in India, there are many who believe in the equity market and other financial instruments. With an intention to tap such customers, Atul Shinghal, Sanjiv Singhal and WS Ravishankar have launched Scripbox. With over 50 years of cumulative experience in the finance segment, the founders are all IIM-Bangalore alumni. The idea behind Scripbox is simple, it allows the user to invest in four pre-selected mutual funds with one click. Talking about how they started, Atul says he was quite disturbed when he over heard his parents discussing how to buy mutual funds. “The discussion wasn’t about the fund itself but brokers and everything around it. There had to be a better way!” says Atul and thus Scripbox was born.

Incubated within Accel Partners backed, Probe Equity Research — Scripbox has a good launch pad. After many rounds of beta testing, Scripbox is now ready for the big stage. “We already have more than 400 users and now it is time we turn the knob,” says Sanjiv, the operations and technology brain at Scripbox. On product building, he adds, “It’s very easy to get deviated from what you want your core offering to be. We had people advising us to allow people to do more but we’ve stuck to keeping it dead simple and the users have appreciated that.” Scripbox isn't targeted towards HNI's or people who're looking to invest very huge sums. It targets people looking to invest 2-5 lakhs of corpus and the kind of a person that saves anything between 10-25k a month.

Scripbox has an algorithm that creates a basket of four mutual funds. The selected funds have consistently performed better than the market over the last four years and the basket approach gives the investor a diversified portfolio. There are other players in the market trying to do something similar but Scripbox is sure its strong fundamentals will sail it through. “We’ve researched the landscape, there are a few others but they give a ‘me too’ feeling. And anyways, the market is too big to worry about competition," says Atul about the competition.

However, the bigger vision for Scripbox is to encourage more Indians to part with their money and invest it the right way. So forget fixed deposits and invest with Scripbox to make your money work for you!

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