`We are toying with the idea of a credit card`

Q&A: Sunil Godhwani

Religare Enterprises, one of the youngest financial services company in the country, has been chalking out an aggressive expansion plan. Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Sunil Godhwani said in an emailed interview to Vandana about how Religare is planning to be a one-stop shop for all financial needs.

What will Religare focus on — retail or institutional business?

Retail is a strong business for us. We are rolling out Religare Finmart designed to cater to the financial needs of MNIs (middle networth individuals). In the first year itself, we plan to have around 200 stores.

We shall also be scaling up our retail presence in the equity and insurance broking businesses. We are also in the process of transferring the institutional broking business, which is currently being carried out by Religare Securities, to Religare Capital Markets. As you know, Religare Capital Markets was the exclusive advisor to Ranbaxy and the Singh family in the Ranbaxy-Daiichi Sankyo deal.

I firmly believe that investment banking will soon become “relationship-based” and not transaction-based as it is now. We hope to keep growing and building up scale globally, by being aggressive and innovative, as we are in all our businesses.

What are the plans in new businesses under Religare Aegon Mutual Fund and life insurance?

We are very bullish on our life insurance business, which we are venturing into in partnership with Aegon and also the asset management business - a 50:50 JV with Aegon.

We have also received a mandate from our board to foray into general insurance, which will be started by the year-end. We are looking at a domain partner for this business as well.

Our wealth management business in JV with Macquarie is also shaping up well, where we continue to scale up our operations and the central leadership team.

We are also evaluating the idea of a credit card in our consumer finance business. Banking is a sector we will be looking at, as the opportunity presents itself in future.

There has been a trend among Indian corporates to foray into private equity. Is Religare looking at it?

We have incorporated a subsidiary known as Religare Venture Capital. There are 2-3 projects in the pipeline. It will be a third party fund raising as we don’t intend to deploy proprietary money.

We will be filing with the Securities and Exchange Board of India for our funds in due course. We are looking at all options, including a real estate fund.