Exclusive | Simplifying money management through Myuniverse: Rahul Parikh

Money management for any individual is the single most priority particularly when you have multiple needs and they have to be managed within your income. Helping you in money management is Myuniverse, a single window online portal promoted by Aditya Birla Money, it helps you to understand your financial health and empowers one to make better decisions, plan for a better tomorrow. One can browse through credit card bills, debit card expenses, loans, mutual funds, FDs, or just about any other financial instrument on Myuniverse.

Says Rahul Parikh, Head, Aditya Birla Money, “this platform is meant for those who want to manage their accounts/money online under one roof. If you look at PFM (Personal Finance management) space in this country, then according to a recent Master Card Survey, India ranked 15th out of 16 on personal finance literacy parameters. There is a general lack of awareness and a heavy reliance on traditional methods like storing gold in bank. It shows that we Indians are good savers but not informed investors and wealth creators.” He was speaking to Adgully.

Essentially there are two reasons why people want to stay away from managing their money online mainly - lack of complete information and complexity associated with the new products.

As for the digital element to the money management, more than 70 per cent of the population is under the age of 35, is the age bracket where most are early in their careers having first or second job in hand. Adds Parikh, “these are the ones who need a lot of savings etc but the issue is that the banks do not effectively reach out to them. This population is less served as compared to other age bracket people and these people have a plethora of options as they use digital more effectively but not for money managing but other options like reading/buying books, booking tickets etc. We want to bridge this gap by giving them an end-to-end money management platform.”

In a year of its existence, Myuniverse has notched up a customer base of 3.70 lakhs customers and is managing  Rs 8,300 crores online. It does three things basically: it collects your finances at one place from all your platforms like; credit cards, bank accounts, etc, this happens automatically. There is no need to manually fill in any information. Once the aggregation is done then the most important step is  analyzing the financial data and giving a relevant advice for the same. Post that if one wishes to do a transaction, option given there and then. “The uniqueness of this platform lies in the fact that it gives an integrated approach to our customers in terms of giving end to end solution for money management,” says Parikh.

As for competition, Parikh replies, there is none as they are in for a completely integrated solution. He says that the space they are operating at, there are a lot of platforms available for aggregation and making transactions online but they are different in the sense that there is no such product that allows one to do everything under one roof.

In terms of advertising and creating awareness, Parikh said, “We did a lot of research in terms of what will work for us and what will not hence we tried all channels right from on ground to digital channels like pad search etc. Now we have started getting a lot of organic customers after a year. We also have a mobile app which is one of the most customized finance apps of India. We see alt of downloads and usage. It is a lifetime free channels but the enhanced one would be chargeable. The Premium version is Rs 550 rupees and the Premium Plus is Rs 750 rupees.”