Digital payments and fintech major PhonePe sees an opportunity to bring millions of Indians who save through gold, fixed deposits and mutual funds into the equity market, with its rebranded 'PhonePe Invest' platform serving as a "bridge" for first-time investors, according to Founder & CPTO Rahul Chari.
PhonePe on Monday rebranded its investing and trading platform Share.Market as PhonePe Invest, bringing it into its broader financial ecosystem. The platform combines stocks, IPOs, mutual funds and F&O offerings with a newly launched Portfolio Optimiser, a proprietary tool to help users build, review and optimise their portfolios.
Chari, who is PhonePe's Founder & Chief Product and Technology Officer, told PTI that the rebranding reflects a broader shift in the company's approach, from serving active investors and traders to also addressing those who have begun saving through smaller, regular investments and may now want to enter the equity market.
"When we started Share.Market, it was designed actually to serve the active investors and traders," Chari said, adding that this represented a small segment compared with PhonePe's wider user base.
The company has observed participation in financial savings products beyond metropolitan and Tier 1 cities, including gold, fixed deposits and mutual funds. Chari attributed this to the ability to invest small amounts, describing it as the "sachet model" of financial services that has helped bring more people into the fold and broaden participation.
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PhonePe allows users to invest in gold and mutual funds through daily systematic investment plans (SIPs) starting at ₹10, while lump-sum mutual fund investments can start at ₹100, he said.
The company sees an opportunity to help some of these savers take their first steps into equities now.
"PhonePe Invest is basically a bridge from PhonePe for the savers and the first-time investors to participate in the equity market. And with the rebrand, we are also launching Portfolio Optimiser, which is a suite of tools that allows you to take the entire journey from building a first portfolio to being able to track your portfolio whenever you want to have it actively tracked and analysed by the platform, and to give you a single-click opportunity to optimise it," he said.
While the company continues to serve the active investors and traders, it wants to make sure that the next set of investors in the market, coming from the broader population of India, "not only have the ability to execute a trade, but can do that tension-free and completely handheld by us", he added.
Rather than estimating a specific addressable market and targets, Chari said the opportunity would depend on educating users about the product and the ways in which it simplifies their investment journey.
If one takes a five-year view, he said, the opportunity lies both in growing the existing base of active investors and traders and turbo-charging overall growth by bringing more first-time investors into the market.
"The opportunity for us now, as we continue to grow the active investor and trader segment, is to actually bring in the millions of users who are investing in their first mutual fund on PhonePe, or have been actively investing in gold," Chari said.
A key part of this effort is 'Portfolio Optimiser', a tool designed to help users build and monitor their portfolios without having to sift through large amounts of financial information or navigate technical jargon.
The tool has three components -- a portfolio builder, an analyser and an optimiser. The builder is aimed at new investors and guides them through selecting investments across different categories, including stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
The analyser provides a view of portfolio health, with research-backed signals indicating whether an investment should be held, monitored or sold.
The optimiser, meanwhile, suggests changes intended to improve diversification and portfolio health, which users can implement through a single-click process.
Chari said the objective was to simplify the experience and guide investors through the process until they become more confident in managing their investments independently.
"Trying to use language that is simple, hand-holding the user through the lifecycle and being there through the entire lifecycle of your portfolio continuously, is the approach that we have taken," he explained.
The tools are not restricted to beginners. Experienced investors could also use the analyser and optimiser to track their holdings, obtain a second opinion on their portfolios and bring investments held outside PhonePe into a consolidated view, he said.
The platform has been developed over roughly a year, following research involving existing PhonePe users who had started investing in "sachet size financial products" as well as users of Share.Market (now PhonePe Invest).
The research examined what discouraged potential investors from entering equities (market) and what additional tools existing investors wanted, he said.
The findings pointed to two broad requirements -- making the first investment less intimidating and bringing portfolio analysis tools, often spread across different interfaces, into one place.
PhonePe is betting on use of artificial intelligence to make investment-related information easier to understand. Chari said potential applications include voice-enabled onboarding, summarising news related to a user's watchlist or portfolio, and delivering those summaries through voice in different languages.
The company is also exploring a chatbot within PhonePe Invest that would allow users to ask questions about their portfolios.
"Having a chatbot that is within the PhonePe Invest app where you can actually talk to it about your own portfolio, as well as have MCPs through which you can actually use your favourite AI chat surface to export your own portfolio and have a conversation about your portfolio externally, both we will support," he said.
Chari pointed out that the investment process itself is largely visual, involving charts, numbers and company information while language support could be more useful for explaining market developments and helping users understand news related to their investments.
For the existing Share.Market users, the transition to PhonePe Invest will not change their holdings, accounts or charges, Chari informed. Existing users will retain their investments and account continuity, with no changes to brokerage structures, fee plans or annual maintenance charges.
The broader aim, he said, is to connect PhonePe's existing savings and financial services ecosystem with equity investing, while continuing to serve experienced market participants.
"The rebranding was the last step," Chari said, explaining that the work behind PhonePe Invest involved a year of product development, deep research and multiple iterations before the new identity was introduced.
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