Choice International Limited
Financial Services
The Choice Group: Redefining Financial Freedom
Written by: Kriti Anand
Company Overview
Choice International was established with an aim to provide an entire array of financial services to individuals as well as corporations. Today, it is a conglomerate that offers Financial and Institutional services ranging from asset management to financial planning and from cross-border transactions to accounting and taxation.
The Choice Group’s focus has always been to collaborate closely with the client and create an ideal business synergy for all parties involved. They function in a manner to suit the client’s requirements to an utmost accuracy with a sense of responsibility and assist them in attaining financial freedom. The Choice Group combines its years of financial expertise with client-oriented servicing to provide top-notch financial services.
Choice International Limited has its headquarters at Mumbai. Choice has achieved a strong foothold across various sections of personal finance through its varied fintech offerings. The company keeps widening its service portfolio to keep pace with technological progress. Fintech products of the company include:
Jiffy: A stock trading platform with expert research analysis. Creating a distinct brand identity and enhancing customer experience via simplified communication and engagement strategies. Subsequently, increasing brand visibility organically via tactics optimized for search as well as social media.
Investica: An online web-based mutual fund platform. Increasing awareness about the importance of Mutual Fund Investments to an audience that needs to be financially educated as well as acquiring leads organically for the Mutual Fund Web and Mobile App Investica.
Choice Connect: A platform where they collaborate with agents for their products. Assisting the financial service distributor with the website design in adherence with the brand guidelines of the parent company. Additionally, vetting out content that caters to the needs of people from 2-3 tier cities and producing a character animation video with the goal to simplify the concept of Choice Connect.
ISMOS: Retail focused Insurance Distribution Platform. The penetration of insurance products in India being lower than the world’s average, an insurance broking business under its ambit of financial products is the company’s next move. The plan is to establish itself in the insurance market by taking over an insurance broking company that has the expertise and rich clientele in the subsequent quarter.
The company also provides institutional services such as regulatory compliances, cross-border transactions, accounting and taxation, and resource management; commodity broking, mutual fund distribution, insurance consultancy, and infrastructural activities.
Altruistically named “Choice”, the Group symbolizes the freedom of it.
Choice Timeline
Choice International Limited started its business in 2008. In two years, the company received its equity and broking license and since then it has been working diligently to provide the best trading platform to its customers. Being a decade old player in the equity business, when Choice entered the business it was running on conventional models, and it witnessed the digital revolution in this sector. It has successfully adapted with the changing market conditions, which has made it one of the prominent equity brokers in India.
In 2011 the company received SEBI license and shifted to a bigger corporate office as the team grew in numbers. Today at their corporate office they are a strong team of 800+ working under one roof contributing to the common vision.
In 2014, they moved overseas and started their first IPO management office in Dubai. In 2015, the Choice Group started its online equity trading app, Jiffy.
They started their tech branch in 2016, which is focused on developing fintech products for their customers. In 2016, Choice International’s MD, Mr. Kamal Poddar was on Indian delegation along with PM Modi.
In 2017, they launched their MF and wealth management app, Investica, which has more than 55000+ active users and a rating to 4.2+ in iOS and Play Store.
In 2018, they expanded inorganically their equity business by acquiring two brokers which strengthen their foothold in that sector even more.
Choice TechLab – Where Experience, Technology and Creativity Unite
Choice TechLab is a subsidiary of the Choice Group. The company retains its lineage in the name with the intent to stay grounded in the value-added system of established expertise but at the same time evolve with the changing times and algorithms. Therefore, technology is at the crux of everything they do, and since all great innovations happen in a laboratory, theirs is a place where creativity is allowed to run wild–monitored only within the rationality of science.
They try to strike the perfect balance between the experience that stood the test of time, evolving technology and creativity backed by data, their lean, homegrown lab is brimming with creatives and digital evangelists, intrinsic of a culture of improvement and resource optimization to deliver more value to stakeholders and eliminate wheel-spinning situations.
The TechLab has certainly proven its worth by propelling the company further within the realm of fintech with products like Jiffy, Investica, Choice Connect and Choice Broking.
Owing to its brand’s popularity, Choice Broking received a fair share of traffic when it was launched. However, it didn’t show up on SERP for targeted search queries. They increased the traffic by 44.24% to the Choice Broking Website in just one month after successful on-page optimization.
Their aim of improving service quality management requires a team effort across a contact centre while keeping the needs of the customer at heart when refining the process.
Future Endeavours
The Choice Group is reputed for keeping pace with upcoming technologies. In the same vein comes OPTIMO – The Robo Expert. In the coming days and months, Optimo will evolve from being a Robo Advisor to a true quant-based recommendation engine for all investable securities, be it Stocks, Mutual Funds, Insurance, or PMS. Optimo will allow any user to validate their portfolio against its algorithm for free.
The company has started reading eCAS files of investors and would generate recommendations on portfolios for free, allowing more people to join Choice’s ecosystem. They also plan to start taking to all Choice Apps for the execution of recommendation and holdings updates. Users would be able to migrate their data to other products.
With ISMOS – Digital Insurance offering, Choice is planning to introduce Insurance broking business under its ambit of financial products. The penetration of insurance products in India is lower when compared to the world’s average and thus there is a lot of potentials.
The Choice Group plans to establish itself in the insurance market by taking over an insurance broking company that has the expertise and rich clientele by the end of financial year.
Digital LAS lending through NBFC: Loan against securities (LAS) enables people to leverage their financial assets to meet their financial requirements. The emergence of retail capital market investment in the past few years has made the product popular among masses. We will offer LAS product in collaboration with a digital platform. LAS lending is a great opportunity for Choice because:
It will enable the company to leverage its stronghold into the broking business.
The LTV is around 50% which makes it one of the most secure forms of lending.
The Choice Group is collaborating with strong LAS players to scale it rapidly.
The Choice Group approaches projects in a highly iterative manner by building hypotheses, testing experiments (smaller pilots, trials & micro-campaigns), measuring results, and iterating using lessons from previous experiments. This allows them to validate communications, designs and ideas to turn them into powerful result-oriented strategies; thereby shortening their time to success.
