After a long wait, One97 Communications-owned Paytm has finally launched its mutual fund app for all. Based out of Bengaluru, Paytm Money would focus on building investments and wealth management products and services.
The Alibaba-backed company today launched a dedicated app Paytm Money for Android and iOS Platforms and offering systematic investment plans (SIPs) for as low as Rs 100 in some of the schemes for smaller towns investors.
Paytm has tied up with 25 asset management companies such as SBI Mutual Fund, LIC, HDFC, Kotak Mahindra, including several others to offer direct plans of mutual funds
According to Pravin Jadhav, whole-time director of Paytm Money, the firm has already registered 850,000 users and out of this, 65 per cent of the people are from beyond the top 15 cities of the country.
Paytm will provide access to over 2,500 users a day and will increase this to more than 10,000 users daily over the next few weeks.
For uninitiated, Paytm Money is a registered investment adviser (RIA) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and it is mandated to offer only direct plans.
Unlike RIA, Paytm Money will not charge fees from their customers and it hasn’t revealed any plan to charge their customers in the future.
It also clarified that the customers will be able to buy mutual funds directly from their bank accounts. They would not need to store money in the Paytm wallet.
With the entry into the mutual fund market, Paytm would like to replicate the business model of its major investor Alibaba’s payment affiliate Ant Financial promoted money market fund called Yu’E Bao. Tencent-backed WeChat Pay also runs Lingqiantong, a flexible money-market mutual fund.
With such a huge userbase in India, Paytm will give tough competition to startups such as Sqrrl, Orowealth, Kuvera, Fincash, Kaleidofin, Goalwise, Scripbox, and ETMoney.
The development was reported by Moneycontrol.
