5 years, 1.5 Cr users, and a unicorn: how Groww become one of India’s fastest-growing investment platforms

Talk about the time before demonetisation, for a common man, investment was a tedious task that involved a lot of paperwork. The process was lengthy, boring, and lacked transparency and in hearsay people almost spared themselves with this complex procedure. 

Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh, and Ishan Bansal too faced similar problems but they did not pass it through and took a deep dig into the industry. 

They found that the process of investing in financial products in India was too complex and opaque. There were close to 200 million people with investable income in India, while only 20 million actively invested and the way to bring the next 180 million on board was by making investing simple.

The ex-Flipsters then founded Groww, an online investment platform based out of Bengaluru in 2016 to provide people with the necessary information, resources and design a user experience to enable them start investing in the simplest way possible.

Fast forward five years, Groww today has a registered user base of 1.5 crores, is one of the fastest-growing investment platforms and has recently joined the unicorn club.

Building an easy investment platform

Groww enables users to invest in Stocks, Mutual Funds, ETFs, IPOs, and gold in a simple, paperless, and hassle-free manner. In two years of launch, in 2018 Groww set the first milestone of registering 50,000 users on its portal. 

Lalit claims that Groww is one of the largest mutual fund distributors in India that has registered more than 2.5 lakh SIPs every month. 

“Today, within a year of launching stocks on its platform, Groww is already among the top five stock platforms in the country by the number of active demat accounts,” Lalit tells SMBStory. 

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The company has followed a customer-centric approach and has ensured a smooth experience in its investments. Lalit says that Groww has positioned itself as a full-stack investment platform and will continue to do the same whilst democratising access to financial services for millions of Indians. 

Leveraging digital

Digitisation has played a crucial role in Groww's growth as Lalit says it is due to digital transformation the company has been able to distribute financial products to more than 900 districts and towns of the country. 

“The government's push for digitisation and the forward-looking vision of regulators has enabled companies like us to onboard millions of users on their platform without having to sign a single sheet of paper. This is ushering in a financial revolution where people from the remotest corners of the country are able to set up an account within a few seconds and invest easily,” Lalit says. 

Groww plans to grow

Talking about the growth plans Lalit says that Groww will expand its product suite, hire top-quality talent, and invest heavily in financial education and awareness. 

“Financial education content has been a critical focus for Groww from its inception. In the next two years, the company plans to launch a slew of financial education initiatives aimed at millennials and expand the market for financial services,” Lalit adds. 

In the coming months, Groww also plans to launch derivatives, low-risk investment products, and US stocks on its platform: some of these products are at present available on the web version of Groww.