From established players liketo early-stage companies like, all are using blog posts, social media messages and innovative educational videos to explain the opportunity to investors in a choppy market, in order to help them take informed decisions.
“In all these years, we have learnt there is common investor behaviour in volatile market conditions. So, we are trying to educate them on how investors had reacted in the past. We are using graphs and charts to explain opportunities in these conditions,” said Karthik Rangappa, vice-president, equity research and education services at Zerodha.
The company runs three initiatives — Varsity, Tradingqna and— to address concerns and questions raised by investors. It has received 46,000 queries overall, with the latest flurry being on two major topics — options trading and taxation — with around 20 to 40 queries coming daily on each, Rangappa said.
ETMoney is also educating investors on how to deal with volatility. “We have been educating users to deal with volatility, with content that is fact-based, short-form and super-simple, like report cards for every mutual fund in simple English,” said Mukesh Kalra, chief executive officer, ETMoney. ETMoney is owned by Times Internet, which is a part of the Times group that publishes this newspaper.
Early-stage startup Groww, which claims it has around 2.2 million users, is relying on video content. “We have created a 12-member inhouse content team for both video and text; we are inviting industry experts to talk about investment topics,” said Harsh Jain, chief operating officer, Groww. “We try to keep the videos simple and less technical, aimed at creating awareness.”
Groww’ssubscriber base has jumped to 31,000 from 5,000 and average views per video has shot up to more than 10,000 compared to 1,000 in the past. Even, with its threemember team, is trying out visual content to pacify users when markets are volatile. These kinds of messaging help tone down customer reactions, said Pravin Jadhav, whole-time director, Paytm Money.
Education awareness efforts are not new in the world of investments, especially with markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India () mandating investor awareness programmes for fund houses. However, it is significant now because the investor community has gone beyond large cities, with many first-time investors needing education.
“Mutual funds penetration has grown dramatically over the last few years, but not everyone truly understands the product. The financial services ecosystem should educate investors about risks and time horizon-based return expectations,” said Madhur Singhal, managing director at consultancy firm.
There are no qualitative metrics to relate content consumption with conversions, but redemptions, or withdrawal of invested money, are lower than new purchases, executives said.
At the time of redemptions, a graphic display of how an investment has behaved over the last seven to eight years helps customers refrain from taking impulsive decisions, said Sanjiv Singhal, chief operating officer of.