From Smart to STARS to Super App - Angel One’s deep investment in technology

Angel One Limited, (formerly known as Angel Broking Limited) is the largest listed retail stock broking house in India in terms of active clients on NSE. Angel One is a technology-led financial services company providing broking and advisory services, margin funding, loans against shares, and distribution of third-party financial products to its clients. They extensively use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create a superior digital experience.

Angel One recently rolled out a campaign around smart investing. Through campaigns like ‘Aage Badhne Ka Smart Sauda’ and #VerySmart, they have been consistently catering to investors who believe in convenience and smart investing solutions. #SmartRepublic is a marketing initiative highlighting investors’ achievements while retaining the core messaging – smart investing.

In an exclusive interview with Adgully for their column Talking insights, Prabhakar Tiwari, Chief Growth Officer, Angel One Ltd, speaks at length about the Smart Republic campaign, crossing the 1 crore+ clients milestone, targeting the younger generation, and more.

Please elaborate more on the smart republic campaign. What was the objective of this campaign, and who are you targeting?

For years, Angel One has been known for its positioning around ‘smart investing’. Through campaigns like ‘Aage Badhne Ka Smart Sauda’ and #VerySmart, we consistently cater to investors who believe in convenience and smart investing solutions. With Smart Republic Campaign, our idea is to take this thought ahead. #SmartRepublic is a marketing initiative highlighting investors' achievements while retaining our core messaging – smart investing.

We recently crossed the 1 crore+ milestone in our client base, and this community of 1 crore+ users is our Smart Republic, who benefited from using Angel One’s products and services. For the campaign, our clients are the brand ambassadors who are encouraging people across the country to start their investment journey with Angel One.

Under the campaign, we rolled out three digital films that highlight key benefits of using Angel One – quick account opening, smart recommendations, and flat brokerage of Rs 0 for cash delivery and Rs 20 per order for other segments. It is an initiative to showcase how using smart investment solutions from Angel One is transforming our client’s financial life.

By launching the campaign across social media platforms, OTTs, and other key digital platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, we are targeting the younger generation, especially GenZ and Millennials, in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. In today’s rapidly digitised world, most investors look for smart and new ways of wealth creation. The campaign creates awareness about Angel One’s faster, smarter, and more economical solutions while encouraging them to choose smart investments.

Who are these smart investors? How are they benefitted, and how do you guide and advise them?

Smart investors are part of our Smart Republic community, who have experienced the ease of using our convenient investing solutions. They make smart decisions enabled by Angel One’s bouquet of smart products, allowing them to advance in their investment journey. Our smart solutions include Smart API, enabling our clients to create investment and trading platforms. We also offer education programs through Smart Money which helps them make informed decisions while participating in the capital market.

Additionally, our users can make smart investments using third-party integrations on our platform. For instance, smallcase helps clients to benefit from curated stocks and exchange-traded funds portfolios, Vested facilitates investment in US-based equities, and Streak enables clients to develop, deploy, and test their trading strategies, helping them make informed decisions. In addition, Quicko equips investors to carry out expert-assisted tax planning and filing.

Through our content creation efforts, we intend to create awareness amongst the audience as we focus on educating users about smart investing. We constantly strive to create educational content about investing and encourage investors to make informed decisions. Our core focus is to dispel myths around bias against the stock market.

What was your brief to your Agency? Please elaborate on the creative concept of this campaign.

We made it clear in brief to the agency that we want to build confidence in the equity markets with our campaign. Earlier investment meant Fixed Deposit (FD) for savings and real estate for growth. Owning land comes with its burdens and cannot be easily monetized. FD means keeping money with the bank and earning interest. Even though it was a great option, FD interest rates have been declining over the years.

With low interest rate regime, technological advancements and simplified investment options, Millennials and GenZ are entering the capital markets diversifying their asset allocation. This new client set understands the long-term advantages of investing in equities, that is, superior returns and easily monetizable, over legacy asset classes like real estate and FDs.

Through the Smart Republic Campaign, we aimed to celebrate the voice of 1 crore+ smart investors associated with Angel One. We refer to our community of smart investors as the Smart Republic. As part of the campaign, investors share their wealth creation stories of leveraging Angel One’s features, such as Zero Brokerage, Quick Account Opening, & Smart Recommendations. The idea of Smart Republic stemmed from the concept of building a community of smart investors, who are also our brand ambassadors.

With this campaign, we want to build on our scale and legacy. We want to communicate the significance of smart investing to the audience through our clients.

What is your next milestone after 10.75 million? How do you plan to achieve the same, and in what period of time?

After accomplishing our milestone of augmenting our client base to more than 1 crore, we intend to expand going forward. We will continue to invest in technology, revenue activities, products, and digitalisation. Recently, we launched the web and iOS version of our Super App for a limited number of users.

Our Super App was built with a vision to make investments across asset classes simpler and easier for investors. It is built on the five key pillars – S.T.A.R.S – Simplicity, Transparency, Availability, Reliability, and Swiftness. The application offers brokerage services but will have more features in the coming year. Our core focus is to enhance customer experience, and the Super App will offer more personalised options to our clients. It is a one-stop destination for all investing needs and will offer third-party mutual funds, insurance, loans, and fixed income products. Through Super App, we intend to simplify finance and investing for our clients throughout their wealth creation journey. We are certain that our existing client base will benefit from these new developments, which will help us onboard more clients in the future.

How do you plan to leverage this campaign? What kind of spending levels are you looking at, and what’s going to be your media strategy?

As a digital-first brand that caters to digital natives, we spend a major portion on digital media with a greater focus on YouTube and OTT platforms. Today, business news channels are the key perception drivers, especially regarding equity markets. So, a certain share of our spending goes their way.

Simultaneously, we spend time on social platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Nowadays, Instagram has a younger audience that is constantly on the lookout for investment-related educational content. Therefore, one of our key focuses is leveraging the follower base of social media influencers to reach our target audience. Short-form video formats, especially reels, make learning about investments interesting. So, we are using the reel format to instill awareness about capital markets and investing. We are also working with the category experts to build engaging content on Twitter Spaces.