Ceat Financial, Zensar In Deal To Set Up Portal

Ceat Financial Services Ltd, an RPG group financial services company, and group infotech company Zensar Technologies have set up a joint venture to launch the first finance portal.

The portal would be exclusively oriented to government securities and the debt market. The portal, fundspark.com would be up and running in July.

Officials told Business Standard yesterday that CFSL would have a 55 per cent stake

in the joint venture and the

remaining 45 per cent would be held by Zensar, formerly

known as International Computers India Limited.

The basic idea behind setting up the portal was to utilise CFSL's strong domain knowledge and its strength in primary dealership.

 

CFSL would concentrate only on distributing insurance and mutual funds products in primary dealership. It is to phase out its fixed deposits business completely recently.

"It would have a major business-to-business element and some business-to-consumer element as well," the official said, adding that it would also help in taking the debt market towards retailing.

Corporate debt paper and bonds would also be dealt with on the portal. It would also examine whether to acquire membership of the debt segment of the National Stock Exchange or not. However, the portal would not deal in equities, since it feels there are enough sites for that. "This would certainly not be a general purpose finance portal. It would cater solely to the debt segment and the government paper market," the sources explained.

CFSL is already a major player in the primary dealership stake, and is one among a total of 20 players and one of four private sector primary dealerships. It did a total of Rs 5,000 crore business in this sector last year.

"With a huge Rs 400,000 crore government debt market, the opportunities are enormous. Besides, though the portal business is generally without entry barriers. In this case, the barrier is that not everyone is primary dealer. fundspark.com will leverage on that", the sources said.

Emphasising that it will be a "brick and click" model portal involving physical deliveries, the sources said the portal will also set up call centres for physical deliveries and involve CFSL's existing branch offices countrywide in the delivery process.

"A primary dealer is a combination of a dealer, an investment banker and a broker. The portal will take advantage of this and work on the competitive advantage gained by CFSL", the sources said.

The name, the sources said, had been purposely kept in English and general so that non-resident Indians abroad can also be attracted by it. With Zensar providing the infotech knowledge, there was no need for a separate partner, the sources said.

CFSL, which is currently grappling with losses, sees this portal as a major means to get out of the red and clean up its act soon.