Working on AI to provide quality research: Share.Market CEO Ujjwal Jain

We have touched approximately Rs 19k cr every month of fresh money coming into the mutual fund industry, Jain said

Share.Market, PhonePe’s stockbroking platform, is launching an “Intelligence Layer on Stocks”, a factor-based analysis of each stock, a first of its kind in the discount broking industry, says UJJWAL JAIN, chief executive officer, Share.Market. In a video interview with Peerzada Abrar, Jain says factor-based analysis streamlines stock research for investors.

Why did you start Share.Market?

We started in 2016 with WealthBasket, the product. The number of people who opened demat accounts in India for the longest time was a very small market. After the discount broking era started and the complete digitisation of the KYC (know your customer) journey came into play, this easy online process gave power of attorney for moving securities. All of that set the foundation for people across India to open an account on the mobile or web without any physical touch points. That means that you can go to the remotest part of the country where people know about markets but don’t have physical touch points. They can simply come on the app and open an account. Covid-19 became the catalyst in expanding the category. Today in 2024, we have reached a point where in the past two months we had the highest demat accounts opened in a month. The category is expanding.

How big is the opportunity?

We have touched approximately Rs 19,000 crore of fresh money coming every month into the mutual fund industry. That has happened because people understood that to create wealth in equities mutual funds are the way to go.

What kind of traction are you witnessing?

We have crossed 200,000 demat accounts (as of today). The number of daily active users is 90,000 and monthly users are over 700,000. Our lifetime customers are 1.62 million, and we have crossed the 1.5 million monthly active mutual-fund systematic investment plans.

How do you see the opportunity in Tier-III cities and towns?

In parts of India where even the spread of demat accounts is small, we are seeing green shoots of customers opening accounts. These include Tier-II and B30 cities, ranked beyond the top 30 (T30) in terms of assets under management. The awareness of looking at markets and equities for long-term wealth creation is going deep into the different pockets of the country. This means there is a large market out there to start getting into equities.

What is your strategy to compete with players such as Zerodha, Upstox, and Groww?

Most of these platforms have done well. But the question is whether you will be able to have leverage in this category based on this strength in the next 10 years. Opening an account is one thing. But what is critical is how you make it intelligent. The kind of architecture, platform and vision you need to have requires a massive amount of data. This includes the ability to create research platforms on which you can open it to consumers. We have done that over the past six years. It took us three-four years to build the foundation for Indians to do a quantitative factor-based analysis of each stock, using technology and data. We have built artificial intelligence (AI) models over the years.

What role will AI play in your products and services?

There are a lot of AI models in the US in stock research. Here you look at unstructured data sets, such as social media and analyst sentiment and the news around the stocks. It is an unorganised repository of content over the internet. We are working on that and have included it in our research models. We have also gone live right now with analysts’ sentiment, which we call “sentiment factor”. You will see a very wide version of that as we bring more unstructured data sets into our AI layers. We have machines and data and models built to do that in a far more unbiased way on an everyday basis.