Tauro Wealth: making investing easy and less complex

Launched by two IIT graduates, Bengaluru-based Tauro Wealth brings a unique investment product that uses thematic and passive investment strategies to yield consistently high returns. The platform claims to have 2000 registered users and over 100 live investment accounts.

Kasturi Priya was over the moon. At 25, after completing her studies, she landed a dream job at Hindustan Lever with an impressive starting package. However, within a year she realised that her fancy seven-figure salary didn’t last until the end of the month. It was surprising how expenses simply increased with time.

Her parents recommended fixed deposits, LIC and mutual funds, and investing in traditional assets like gold and real estate. While she seemed keen on a few ideas, Kasturi was looking for more options.

Understanding that different people had different kinds and types of investment needs, 35-year-old Harsh Vardhan Singh and 34-year-old Anand Vivek Srivastava, friends since their IIT Kanpur days decided to start a wealth management platform – Tauro Wealth in November last year in Bengaluru.

How it works

It is a fully-automated, technology-driven investment platform targeting Indian customers. The biggest differentiation for the platform is their unique investment product is that the product uses passive and thematic investment strategies to ensure higher returns from the investment process.

The team has partnered with Sharekhan Limited, one of India’s largest brokerage companies.

You can open a new Sharekhan account through Tauro Wealth and once it is linked, you can invest, rebalance and monitor all your investments directly through your Tauro Wealth account.

Once the initial setup is done, the investor need not spend more than five minutes once in every few months to keep track of all investments from a single account. New investors can use the fully-automated recommendation system to make all their investment decisions simply by setting their investing traits and choosing between lumpsum or SIP options.

Seasoned investors who wish to have more control over their investments can go through the platform’s list of thematic portfolios and choose their investments based on their personal views. It also offers advanced features such as allocation advice, personal stock recommendations, and portfolio customisation.

Figuring out the differences

While most fintech players in the investing space redistribute traditional products like mutual funds, Tauro Wealth has created its own unique investment product.

“We have more than 50 different thematic stock portfolios available on our platform that provide tailored investment solutions to each individual investor,” explains Harsh.

Harsh previously worked in Deutsche Bank and Anand in Microsoft, so their expertise in finance and technology proved to be the perfect combination needed to create a product that solved the problems of traditional investment products.

The duo’s inspiration to create Tauro Wealth came from working with and observing a large number of retail investors constantly struggling with the ever-growing knowledge and information gap in the financial world.

“Having faced personal challenges of investing in stock markets and watching friends and family repeat basic investing mistakes, the idea of using technology to simplify the investment process seemed like a winning proposition for everyone,” Harsh says.

Growing need for wealth management

Tauro Wealth started with a small team of four people and a seed/angel funding round to develop proprietary algorithms for stock portfolio creation.

While Fintech seems to be the new buzzword, personal wealth management and advisory businesses are growing fast. A report by the Central Statistics Office’s First Advance Estimates of National income pegs the per capita net national income at Rs 1 lakh, which shows a 10.4 percent increase when compared to that of 2015-16.

A net inflation consumer price index (CPI) of 3.65 percent (until March) hints at a disposable income that consumers might have to invest in various market instruments.

While there are other platforms that work towards helping individuals choose different investment options like Policy Bazaar, Prudential.com, and even ICICI Bank that has ventured into a goal-based investment with iwish; startups like Kuvera, Wealthbox and Goalwise are beating the odds.

Standing out in the crowd

Explaining the difference Tauro Wealth brings, Harsh says that its suite of proprietary stock portfolio building algorithms are optimised to perform exceptionally well in the long-term.

He adds that Tauro Wealth doesn’t rely on third-party investment products (mutual funds), thus making its product unique and business model stronger than competing platforms.

As of 2016, Indian households had an estimated $2 trillion as total savings, one of the highest savings figures amongst large global economies. Harsh, however, adds that there exists a huge gap with less than 10 percent of these savings invested in financial assets.

“Individuals in India own roughly two percent of the total market capitalisation of the domestic stock market as compared to 15-18 percent in large economies like the US and Europe,” explains Harsh.

The team believes that there is rampant misselling by financial companies, that have a vested interest in generating higher transaction revenue through inappropriate products like IPOs, derivatives and short-term stock trading.

Revenue and future plans

“It is nearly impossible for a retail investor to build a long-term financial investment portfolio with the tools available to them today,” says Harsh.

The team raised angel funding from Tracxn Labs and four undisclosed investors.

Since its launch, Tauro Wealth claims to have over 2000 registered users, over 100 live investment accounts and 30 percent month-on-month growth in AUM from existing and new accounts.

Harsh informs that its portfolios have generated average returns of over 27 percent compared to 12 percent in mutual funds and close to 10 percent in benchmark index performance up to June 2017.

“Over the next five years, we have set a target to help one lakh Indians in fulfilling their long-term investing needs through Tauro Wealth. We would like to develop our product as a one-stop solution for investors to build, manage and monitor their wealth by creating balanced, long-term investment portfolios,” he says.

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