Trendlyne’s Remarkable Journey: Growth, Expansion, and Innovations in the Fintech Landscape
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Paban Pabreja, Founder and CEO at Trendlyne
- Tell us about the growth and expansion plans of Trendlyne.
Trendlyne has seen phenomenal growth. In the B2C segment, It has more than doubled its MAU, sessions, and page views in the past 12 months. Trendlyne also services more than 700 Million APIs per month from its B2B customers.
We have launched 2 new products in the past quarter – Starfolio which is a basket investment product and Stock Reports – real-time stock reports in PDF format for the first time globally.
Trendlyne is also set to launch its services in 3 new geographies by the end of this year.
- How can Starfolio help the masses?
Investor needs can be quantified into five categories – Research/Analysis, Tracking, Alerts, Trade Execution, and Advice.
While the Trendlyne platform takes care of the first 3 – Analysis, Tracking/Monitoring and Alerts, Starfolio completes the loop by providing a framework to execute trades and seek advice on the platform.
DIY investors can make their own baskets from Analysis tools like Screeners, Watchlists, Superstar holdings. We are onboarding multiple RAs and RIAs on Starfolio so that people can get advice on the same platform.
- Kindly share your views on the growth of fintech brands in India’?
Fintech is a pretty young space in India, and there’s a lot of room for growth. We have seen a lot of startup activity in payments, lending and stock trading – brands like PhonePe, PayTM, Groww and others are young but already quite iconic. I think what is also now happening is a deepening of the ecosystem, as users and investors in India get more savvy – the use of analytics tools, DIY platforms and others which integrate and build alongside big transactions players like brokerages, banks and payment apps.
- How Trendlyne helps people to invest in correct and profitable stocks?
We are a stock analytics company that caters both to B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) customers. That has been our identity from the start.
The first product we launched was stock screeners. With this, you can screen stocks using system queries. You can build your own screeners as well. Then we launched the DVM (durability, valuation and momentum) stock score. This basically gives a score for every stock across financial quality, valuation and momentum.
The Indian market has a lot of news and tips. But how does a retail investor get enough time to scan a stock in detail— look at the financials and the management, check if there have been auditing issues, or if the valuation is too expensive. So, we have tried to give this information based on these three scores on top, to help the investor make an independent assessment.
This has proved to be extremely popular with users, because not only does it help one find stocks with a potential upside, you can also avoid investing in stocks with a sharp downside risk. For example, there are many startups that have listed recently . Their scores clearly show that these are extremely loss-making ones. There is no manual interference to these scores and it’s completely automated, rule-based scoring.
Our business model has been to build analytics products that have a clear moat in the market. For example, we are the only player in India that does back-testing on a query level. So, you can write a query for a screener, saying I want to look at stocks having a certain revenue and profit growth, and run a screener and then back-test it to see if it has actually performed well, historically.
Our ‘Alpha alerts’ have also proved to be quite popular. You can set real time alerts on corporate announcements, bonus splits, target prices, superstar investors buying stocks, etc. A lot of unstructured and structured data is part of our alerting mechanism. What is unique about alpha alerts is their sheer range.
5. What makes Trendlyne different from other stock investment platforms?
- Breadth of products: Investors aren’t siloed, but products available to them are. Investors need a breadth of products and features on the same platform. Trendlyne has stock scores, proprietary SWOT, screeners, backtesting, realtime alpha alerts, realtime portfolio analytics and stock reports Trendlyne covers Stocks, MFs and Futures and Options – all 3 segments.
- Wide variety of data feeds – structured and unstructured: We build our own data feeds and that makes us somewhat unique in the market. We don’t just take data feeds from financial market data vendors We are able to provide alerts based on unstructured data. For example, you can set a real-time alert for results declared where the net profit growth has been greater than zero for all your portfolio watchlist stocks.
- B2B + B2C segments: While other companies in this space have remained either B2B or B2C. Trendlyne is equally successful in both segments.
Trendlyne powers brokers like 5Paisa, IIFL, ICICI Securties, HDFC securities, SBI securities, Phone Pe and 20 other brokerrages, You can find Trendlyne Analysis on Moneycontrol, Livemint and Business Today
On The B2C front Trendlyne is vistied by over 15 lakh users on a monthly basis.
- How do you see rise of AI in Fintech space?
Current versions of AI are great at doing text analysis. Whether it be summarizing 100 page reports into concise summaries or evaluating sentiments of the reports or earnings calls or other corporate announcements – AI does an excellent job at these tasks. Trendlyne is piloting a couple of products in this area which will ease the research burden for the investors.
AI currently is severely hamstrung with the data part of the analysis. At the core of the GPT like AIs is the algorithm that tries to predict which word comes next. This algorithm fails even at basic math like multiplying two 3 digit numbers. GPT4 has an accuracy of only 59% on 3 digit number multiplication. Only 4% on 4 digit number multiplication and zero on 5×5.
This means that the tables we see on websites and apps currently are there to stay – for now. However, there will be interesting products coming out in the space of textual insights and document search using AI.
