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The trade and capital markets are the most volatile markets in the world. While one wrong move has the ability to cause significant risks to investors and traders, smartly harnessing the volatility can also help in generating solid returns. Although markets go through a lot of fluctuations and crashes, the right kind of guidance can help traders take the correct decisions.

And that’s exactly what Rajandran R and Gopalakrishnan N set out to do when they started FinfoLab Technologies. A pool of fintech products like Algomojo, FEBINARS, Marketcalls, TradeAction, Traderskart and OptionAction, the Bengaluru-based startup caters mostly to the capital market space and provides financial solutions to brokers and retail traders. Apart from helping traders in automating their trades, the company also educates customers and teaches them to build and program trading strategies, implement risk management controls and various execution controls.

Rise of a new fintech brand

When the duo came up with the idea to start FinfoLab in early 2021, they had one aim – to bring simplicity to traders. Rajandran says that while there are a lot of opportunities for traders in the present day, they depend on social media for more information on trades which is risky. He adds that they aimed to build an analytics platform that can clear most of the challenges traders face.

With a background in engineering, Gopalakrishnan has more than 20 years of experience in building fintech solutions. Before starting this company, he was the technology head of Thomson Reuters and co-founded IDEALx, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters. Rajandran is a telecom engineer and has more than 10 years of experience in telecom companies. A trader since 2006 himself, Rajandran is also an expert in designing trading systems and is the founder of Marketcalls, which is now a part of FinfoLab Technologies.

“I have been trading for more than a decade now, and I have seen the ups and downs of the market. Markets are not easy to trade in, so one needs the right skill to become a trader. Being an investor is comparatively easy, but being a trader needs the right mindset and right attitude towards markets, and that requires a bit of training. So we’re trying to address that, and help traders enhance their skills,” he says.

Rajandran adds that he left his job in the telecom industry to build innovative apps that could fulfil the day-to-day needs of traders. He says that’s where the idea of FinfoLab came in, and the fact that he was running Marketcalls – a simple chat application for traders – helped him significantly. The application got more than 2 million pageviews a day, and that gave Rajandran confidence that this product had the potential to do well with traders.

With clients like Zerodha, Upstox, Angel Broking, Aliceblue, Fyers, Tradejini, Firstock, Zebu, Goodwill, Samco and more, FinfoLab Technologies has established itself as a major solution provider within the first year of its inception. The startup has clocked an annual revenue of more than Rs 1 crore in the first half of FY 2021-22.

The entry of automation

Automation has always been the core USP of the company. As an algorithmic trading platform, the brand offers not only an algorithmic trading solution but also a complete trading terminal. Rajandran says, “We provide an equivalent platform as brokers, which is capable of doing both automated trading and manual trading. Our core strength lies in designing applications and providing an end-to-end solution for algo-traders.”

Adding to how internal process automation has helped them grow quickly, he says, “We create our own CRM modules, platforms, and tools. We have a multiverse of skills ranging from trading to automation space to internal configuration and application development. We have built a brand identity over the years, and it has helped us establish a strong connection with systematic traders.”

He adds that their platform also provides mentorship and guidance to people who want to learn to trade, apart from providing tools for automation trading. While most brands provide readymade solutions and .exe applications, the brand offers complete end-to-end cloud-based trading solutions for DIY traders.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Rajandran says they used to run a brand called Traders Cafe, where they used to give consultation to traders in a co-working space.

Catering to Indian traders

Rajandran says that their focus has always been to serve the audience in India, and Indians who stay abroad. “The .in domain gives us a strong brand identity, and getting the extension is much easier than .net domains. Adding to that, our technical expertise has helped us bring in a sizeable revenue in six months,” he says.

He adds that just having the .in domain doesn’t equate to the success of a brand. “It is very important to have the necessary skills and understand the needs of customers, and to know how to make their experience better,” he adds.

Many such brands like FinfoLab Technologies have built a strong brand identity with the help of the .in and .Bharat domains. Availing these domains has become easier for budding brands with the help of the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), which in turn, has helped them grow their businesses considerably. Available in 22 Indian languages, these domains not only create a strong brand identity but also make sure that it gives the brands an Indian feel.

Talking about the initial roadblocks at an operational level, Rajandran says, “All our customers are mostly online, and we don’t have any offline space to meet, so it’s on us to constantly educate our customers. And it wasn’t just for customers, but our employees as well because it was an unprecedented situation for all of us. So tools like Zoom call and others definitely helped a lot in overcoming that phase.”

FinfoLab plans to upgrade to more than one lakh trading orders per day within the next year as compared to the current 5,000 orders. “Going forward, our plan is to build a smooth highway so that traders are able to automate trades on their own. So our aim is to ensure a smoother trading experience,” he says. Talking about updates to their platform, he says that they are planning to introduce paper trading, where traders don’t need to come up with real money to automate their ideas.