Fisdom- Invest smart from your smartphone

We all want to invest our savings wisely, make our money grow and secure a better financial future for ourselves and our loved ones. But for most of us from non-finance backgrounds, investment has been a tricky stuff to understand. There are dozen different types of investment options with hundreds of companies and thousands of financial products fighting for your attention and money.

There are many factors that make financial investments a tricky business
Risk vs rewards- there are many safe ways to invest money where your principal is guaranteed, but rewards could be so low, it won’t even cover the inflation. On the other hand there are many potentially high rewarding investment options, but come with a huge risk that should the opposite happen, you stand to lose most or all of your investments. In order to optimize risks one should balance the above to and find a right mix that ensures adequate safety as well as reasonable returns

Whom to buy from? There’re hundreds of companies and an army of agents, advisors and other professionals who claim to know how everything works and are eager to help you invest your money. But these agents are often associated with specific financial corporates and try to push the products they want to sell (so that their targets are met and commission is realized). Finding a trust worthy financial advisor who puts your benefits and interests ahead of his personal gains is a tough task

Paperwork- Investments often involve complex paperwork which take away lots of your time. Trying to keep track of all your investments, related papers and being able to take right decision at right time is very critical, but there are not many tools still that can help us with all that.

So is there a solution that caters to all the above? Is there a way investment decisions and actions can be informative, easy, fun as well as convenient?

Yes, Welcome to Fisdom, a financial wisdom application that lets you manage all your investments right from your smartphone.

Fisdom has a one-time registration process which involves you sharing your ID proof, PAN card etc for regulatory compliance purpose. Once this is verified, subsequent transactions are easy and fun to operate.

Fisdom takes away the complexities of investments- hard to understand financial jargons are extremely simplified and presented to users in plain English- let us look at some samples

Save for a goal!
There are few things we can afford to achieve only once in life- retiring early with adequate cash, a much dreamed of trip, a luxury set of wheels- these things take lots of planning and committed repeat investments. Traditionally you will have to do lots of research to identify the right instrument, do lots of calculations to decide what amount to be set aside to meet the target and then get into concerned financial institutions to execute your savings plan. Fisdom simplifies all these to just a few basic steps. You can define how much you wish to save and by when and how much you can afford to set aside each month, the app does rest of the work- it calculates the right mix of stock and bonds, gives you a projection of potential earnings over time w.r.t your investment, identifies most appropriate mutual funds/saving instruments to invest in. Once you are convinced, actual investment can be done in another few steps, from your phone, within minutes.
 

Similarly, “Build Wealth” feature on Fisdom App lets you decide the bond vs stock mix, based on your risk appetite and gives earning projections followed by recommended companies and products to invest in. This way, Fisdom makes investment process extremely simple, easy to understand and control. FIsdom automatically enforces the golden rule of investment- don’t put all your eggs in one basket- Fisdom shortlists 4-5 best products for your need and lets you split your savings among them- this way, risk is lower even if one of these products are to fail over time.

Invest Surplus: This option lets you invest your current surplus cash into various mutual funds and savings options to maximize returns.

Save Tax: Depending on your current tax exempted investments, this section lets you make additional investments in instruments that gets you tax concession.

Fisdom App’s easy to use navigation, plain English narration and step by step guidance makes investment an extremely easy experience for everyone one. Do try it. There is no minimum cap on how much you should invest- you can probably try the app with as low as Rs 1000 and then once your comfort level increases, start investing more through the app.

My wish-list or possible improvements on the Fisdom app are as below
1.    Show fund performance- while the app proposes best funds to invest, if I can see how it has performed in recent time compared to its peers then it will be nice.
2.    Faster account verification and on-boarding
3.    Live chat with a finance expert to get any queries clarified before investment
4.    Ability to add custom goals- like an international trip next year (at present need to select from an existing list)

Disclaimer: No app can ensure your investment is loss-proof. Please do additional readings on the investments you are planning, to ensure that returns won’t be drastically different than what you anticipate. Periodic review and corrective measures also is key to maintaining a healthy portfolio.