Upstox’s customer base has surpassed the 6 million-mark: Shrini Viswanath

Upstox (also known as RKSV Securities) is one of India’s largest online investment platforms. The company was founded with the vision of making financial investing easy, equitable, and accessible to all Indian investors. It offers online investments in Stocks, Derivatives, Commodities, Currencies, Mutual Funds, and ETFs for investors and traders. Backed by Ratan Tata and venture capitalists such as Tiger Global, Upstox offers a best-in-class technology-enabled trading platform. Headquartered in Mumbai, Upstox holds memberships with the NSE, BSE, MCX, and MCX-SX.

Recently, Upstox went through a rebranding exercise and changed their logo, which embodies simplicity and agility, and their commitment to growth. The new logo is also representing a new phase of their journey to move a step ahead in the direction of growth. This IPL Season, Upstox as part of its ‘Start Karke Dekho’ campaign has launched three new TVCs that depict investing through Upstox is simple and seamless. The three TVCs showcase the new suite of features added on Upstox’s new platform and its intuitive design makes discovery and picking of stock easy. It propagates to invest smartly with the help of curated lists and personalised news.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Shrini Viswanath, Co-founder, Upstox, elaborates on how they have grown tremendously over the last decade, the recent rebranding strategy, campaign strategy and how the company plans to further scale up their operations. 

The investment climate looks positive and the Sensex is also climbing. Did you witness any growth in your customer base, and what kind of trends can one notice in online trading with the new generation?
The economic re-opening, vaccination drive picking pace, and optimism that normalcy would return soon have made the investment environment largely favourable. The year 2020 was unprecedented in many ways and brought enormous challenges and simultaneous learnings to the world. The pandemic’s impact was varied, and many people focused on adding to their financial knowledge. More and more investors are choosing to diversify their income streams by investing in the stock market. They are exploring ways to boost their income and looking for approaches to diversify their portfolio.

At Upstox, we’ve seen a steady increase in our customer base, which has now surpassed the 6 million-mark. In FY21, we added over 2 million new customers, resulting in a three-fold increase in client onboarding. Some interesting customer trends that we witnessed:

  • Nearly 70% of our customers are first-time investors
  • More than 80% of our total customer base is in the age group of 18-35 years
  • Over 80% of our customer base is from Tier 2 & 3 cities 

The new generation transacts everything on the go. You have revamped the platform and App with new features and made it more user-friendly. How is it going to help your current and potential customers?

The new generation is technology savvy, and they need everything at the click of a button. Out of our over 6 million customer base, nearly 45% are mobile traders. And, our new app will bring everything investment-related to their fingertips.

Several new features and tools have been added to the new platform to reduce complexity and make investing more seamless, intuitive, and accessible to all traders, while keeping in mind the first-time traders as well. Features such as logging in with a single tap, accessing curated news and reports, creating dynamic watchlists, the ability to make transfers & withdrawals instantly, etc., will be very useful to our users. The goal of this new platform is to empower users to make informed trading decisions and instil confidence in them by providing tools, insights, and information. This is just the beginning, soon we will be introducing new tools to assist users in applying for IPOs, discovering and analysing stocks, trading options with a powerful strategy builder, and gaining AI-backed insights from user and community trading behaviour, among other things.

Upstox’s entire technology suite is built in-house with an endeavour to develop a stable and easy-to-use platform that is both fast and accurate. Upstox’s new platform is currently available on Google Play Store, and will be rolled out on the web and  iOS soon. 

Post IPL, we have the T-20 World Cup. Will you be associating with that event to further supplement and strengthen the brand’s equity?
With the integration of sports and finance, we intend to create financial awareness and spread a culture of investment across the country. Both the cricket properties bind a cross-section of audiences and have unparalleled reach across age groups and geographies. We intend to leverage Upstox’s popularity among millennials and target consumers in India’s Tier 2 and 3 markets. Our target audience includes DIY traders and investors, millennials and young adults who want to manage their finances better. The focus is to empower every investor with an easy-to-use and simple investing platform. 

Your association with IPL has been strong. How did it benefit the brand, any measurement technique followed to evaluate the effectiveness?

With IPL resuming after a break of four months, we hope to leverage this partnership to strengthen our brand awareness further. We want to engage with millennials as the brand continues to execute its vision of making financial investing easy, equitable, and affordable for all. Upstox’s aim has always been to change the way investing is done in India, very much like the way IPL has modified cricket. We want to make financial investment more appealing, which will encourage more millennials to start investing. 

Have you redefined your corporate strategy to reposition Upstox with the brand-new identity? How do you plan to promote and create awareness for the new brand identity?

Upstox has grown tremendously over the last decade and redefining the strategy is an opportunity to increase our foothold in the market and also scale up. Brand repositioning offers us a new path forward and upward. With our new platform, we aim to resonate with the millennials and GenZ and be the go-to platform for our existing and potential investors. The transformation will be seen across all Upstox platforms. This avatar aims to build a strong connection with the millennials and GenZ investors and will make us a one-stop-shop solution for all their investment needs.

Currently, Upstox’s new logo has been introduced to the audience via TVCs and on digital mediums. 

Rebranding the company logo is an important decision. What prompted this new brand identity for Upstox and what was the purpose behind the same?

The new logo embodies simplicity and agility, which we value at Upstox, while resonating our commitment to growth. We are all set to start a new phase of our journey, and our logo represents a step ahead in this direction. The timing was perfect; we have just updated our app, expanded our service offerings and surpassed the 6-million customer mark.

The logo incorporates an upward arc to represent our steady and consistent upward movement and growth. It depicts an upward move intuitively rather than relying on narrow, literal concepts such as graphs or charts. The arc neatly fits into the fore of the ‘u’, resulting in a custom letterform that is a modern take on a decade-old way of writing – on paper, in cursive.

The brand has also updated its colour palette to purple, which represents exclusivity and the wisdom of time-honored investing made modern. The new brand design and logo reflect simplicity and agility that are important to the company.

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