Stockbroking platform BlinkX aims to redefine investment experience for users
JM Financial’s stockbroking platform BlinkX believes there is an opportunity to build a strong brand with a focus on personalised customer experience.
Global brokerage firm JM Financial’s fifty-year legacy in the Indian financial services sector has created a certain level of trust among its customers. It now wants to extend this trait in the digital world as well.
The financial services firm forayed into the digital broking space two years ago by creating a separate brand called BlinkX to offer services such as stock trading, applying for IPOs, and futures & options. The app also empowers traders with cutting-edge tools and real-time data to make informed investment decisions.
Despite entering a space that is already crowded with new-age players like Zerodha, Groww, and Upstox, as well as legacy companies like ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank, which have their own digital platform, BlinkX aims to stand out by focusing on being customer-centric and a tech-driven financial stockbroking app.
BlinkX MD Gagan Singla
“We are not trying to be just opportunistic here as BlinkX is focused on building a long term, technology-based digital broking platform that has a high premium on customer experience,” says Gagan Singla, Managing Director of BlinkX, in a conversation with Enterprise Story.
Long-term focus
BlinkX’s foray into the space also needs to be seen in the context of the rising number of demat accounts in India. According to ICICI Direct, as of June 2024, there were 16.2 crore demat accounts with the addition of 42 lakh in June alone. The numbers continue to rise and there is increased participation from the retail investors.
Given this scenario, BlinkX believes there is still an opportunity to create its own identity for the long term—in the next 10, 20 years.
Despite entering a crowded space, BlinkX felt there were certain gaps that were left unaddressed.
BlinkX saw that numerous digital broking platforms were prone to errors, especially with respect to apps hanging or not able to execute the trades in a quick time.
To address this, BlinkX firstly made it its top priority to create a “no glitch” app. Secondly, it remained focused on building what was relevant to the customers.
“There is sometimes an overburdening of information and we wanted to provide services which had a lot of relevance for the customers,” says Singla.
Customer centric
JM Financial started actively looking into the digital broking segment in 2021, and BlinkX was formally launched in October of 2022. The app went live in May 2023.
At the same time, JM Financial also saw the broader changes happening with respect to technology-led businesses, where the focus had moved towards building sustainable ventures as against the previous trend of growth at all costs. In addition, technology was bringing a big change in how people were looking at saving and investing, and there were a lot of personalisation elements.
However, this also meant that characteristics like trust and simplicity were the key elements which would draw customers to digital platforms.
Singla claims that BlinkX has a high rating on the Google Play and Apple App Store.
GenAI features
In line with this, BlinkX is also making strong bets on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). It has already incubated a GenAI lab where the core focus is to build personalisation features for its customers.
BlinkX has around seven to eight ongoing GenAI projects and some of them are expected to get into production mode soon. “One will see a lot of products from us which will create hyper personalised nudges for our customers,” Singla says.
As of now, BlinkX has around 40,000 accounts on its platform and it claims these are high quality customers who actively trade with strong ARPU (average revenue per user) with encouraging renewal rates. According to Singla, most of the customers are onboarded through subscription plans of Rs 199 and Rs 799. They do not offer free accounts.
The digital broking platform is also giving weightage to those customers who are actively into trading and believes in providing them the technology depth. Singla claims that many of the customers have graduated from passive investment into active traders.
As part of its future plans, BlinkX is looking to bring newer financial instruments to the platform, which include mutual fund investments. Besides, it is also looking at building a web platform. It has a 450-member team spread across various functions.
BlinkX is also rolling out technology infrastructure where it builds linkages with the existing businesses of JM Financial.
“We are at the last stage of building out the tech and now we are aiming at getting the scale,” Singla says.
(The article has been updated)
Edited by Megha Reddy