Flipkart-owned PhonePe incorporates new wealth management arm

Called PhonePe Wealth Services, the company will act as an agent, advisor, distributor, franchiser, surveyors and consultant for financial products.

With wealth management always on PhonePe’s larger strategy, the Bengaluru-based payments company has incorporated its own wealth management arm, according to filings from the Registrar of Companies.

Called PhonePe Wealth Services Pvt. Ltd., the company was incorporated on November 15 and will be based out of PhonePe’s Bengaluru headquarters. According to the RoC, the total paid-up capital in the new entity stands at Rs 20 crore.

As per the official documents, PhonePe Wealth Services will act as an ‘agent, advisor, distributor, franchiser, surveyors and consultant for financial products such as deposits, mutual funds, government securities, shares, stocks, bonds, debentures, digital gold, e-gold’ amongst others, either by itself or through partnerships.

The RoC also suggests that Terence Onie Lucien and Aniruddha Shashkant Patwardhan are going to be the Directors of the company.

Terence, who joined PhonePe in April, has been heading the Mutual Funds section for the Flipkart-owned company for the last nine months. Prior to this, Terence was the Chief Innovation Officer at Indian stock broking firm, Angel Broking.

Aniruddha Patwardhan’s LinkedIn profile says that he has been working in the engineering team of PhonePe.

The news comes, four months after, PhonePe’s arch-rival Paytm launched its wealth management platform, Paytm Money.

Headquartered in Bengaluru too, Paytm Money is a wholly-owned subsidiary of One97 Communications Limited. It acts as a direct mutual funds investment platform, which has tied up with close to 25 AMCs (Asset Management Companies).

Apart from payments and e-gold, this will be another vertical where PhonePe is challenging the Noida-based financial behemoth. The Paytm platform has also tied up with rating services - MorningStar, CRISIL, and Value Research to ease investment decisions for its users. Before the launch, the platform already had more than 850,000 users registering for early access.

While the competition gets stronger for both these entities, the entry of PhonePe and Paytm can only be taken as positive news for the mutual fund industry. In FY18 alone, the mutual fund industry added close to 8.32 lakh SIP accounts each month with an average size of around Rs 3,200.