Women are forming an increasingly growing segment for ETMONEY: Santosh Navlani

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, ETMONEY unveiled an investment report based on financial insights gathered from its rapidly growing female user-base across 1,300+ cities. The report debunks myths about the financial behaviour of Indian women, and can gives a deeper understanding of the underlying factors that have paved the way for the success of women investors in India. The report highlights the fact that financial services are gender agnostic and also reveals how women are making the best use of these services.

In conversation with Adgully, Santosh Navlani, COO, ETMONEY, speaks about the growing woman user base for financial services and how their consumer insights are unique when compared to their male counterparts. He also talks about the future of the woman user base and the positive impact it will have on the market.

How has the female user base for financial services grown in recent times? Is the pandemic a factor in the growth of the women user base? Could you tell us about some of the other aspects that have led to this growth?

There have been multiple tailwinds ranging from the spike in e-wallets, UPI usage and invariably the pandemic that have led to an increase in adoption of financial services among women. With convenient digital payments becoming increasingly common among Indian consumers, and less commute from Work From Home (WFH) leading to higher average savings, women are forming an increasingly growing segment for ETMONEY.

What are your consumer insights from this growing women user base? Is there a steady growth from regional markets as well? Give us some insights in terms of demographics and buying behaviour of women users.

Women exhibit unique behaviours. Maybe an extension of how our mothers or grandmothers have saved. So, they focus on savings first, which means they tend to first maximise their tax-saving investments. On ETMONEY, women’s share of tax-saving ELSS funds in their portfolios is over 20% more compared to that of men. They also allocate more to safer assets like Debt Mutual Funds, and have also been successful in maintaining a near optimal Equity-Debt split for their age. This shows their deep understanding of each asset class and the importance of asset allocation. That’s where we see increasing women investing in ETMONEY’s SmartDeposit that invests in Liquid Mutual Funds and also offers instant withdrawal facility 24*7, 365 days a year.

ETMONEY being a mobile-first way of investing, we primarily have a younger audience. The 25-40 age-group forms a larger section of our customers and more or less the age-split is similar to males for women too. However, we see non-metros bringing a healthy influx of women investors. Women from cities such as Surat, Dehradun, Jabalpur, Bhubaneshwar, and Mysore have joined the investment bandwagon in significant numbers.

What are some of the financial services that women can avail to fulfill their aspirations? How is the market different for the woman user today?

Financial services are mostly gender agnostic. It is the lifestage, personal preferences, financial goals, time period of investment or usage of product, risk taking ability and one’s tolerance to ups/ downs in finances/ investments that determine suitability of product to a customer. What is needed is awareness via education, bringing user context to that education and customising/ personalising the financial products mix to users, be it males or females. Due to greater penetration of smartphones and 4G, the accessibility of products has increased. And with higher accessibility, the competition and hence, innovation/ simplification is on the rise. It is this change that is getting accelerated in the market that women are able to take advantage of rather than products undergoing big change.

Could you tell us about some of the initiatives that you have carried out to reach out to the women users? What are the products and services that benefit them? How exactly are you looking at communicating with them?

At ETMONEY, we primarily focus on financial and investment education as the primary way to grow the market. To that end, we have a content focused strategy to answer people’s questions via our ETMONEY YouTube channel, Quora Answers, ETMONEY blog and content-led nurturing of our user base to be able to make them active investors. The content program on App, once you sign-up as an investor, is more personalised to one’s interests and browning behaviour than only gender. We are believers in contextualising and personalising product’s role in user’s life and to that end, women tend to be buyers of SmartDeposit, Tax-saving products like ELSS Mutual Funds, Health Insurance and long term SIPs in Hybrid Funds when compared to men.

For the financial services market, how big is the women user base in 2021? How important will this market be in the coming years? Give us some insight into this.

Women as a segment are small, but growing. As of now, only about 1 in 5 users of ETMONEY is a woman, that’s just 20%. The potential is at least 40% if not 50%. Given that ETMONEY caters to salaried and self-employed audience, with increasing women participation in the workforce, the market can at least double. More importantly, women tend to be more disciplined investors and hence from a value standpoint, they are more positively positioned to benefit from Investment Products as they give more time to investments to benefit from the power of compounding. As we progress, we look to offer family accounts that will motivate more men and women to jointly manage finances and thus grow this market further. There is a lot of benefit from customers as well as businesses by thinking families as a customer segment than Men or Women. After all, be it men or women, the long-term investments are always family-first.