Being a tech savvy company in an offline industry
We believe in lean and efficient teams rather than large teams. We talked about this in the previous blog as well and how tech team at Goalwise is trying to do its part in order to adhere to this philosophy. However this does not just end at one team but is something that every team in the company tries to do. Our operations team is no different.
Being an online mutual fund distributor there are a lot of things that our back office has to do. Our site is where the story begins but the operations team drives it home. They are the bridge between what customer wants and the mutual fund industry needs — from the KYC of the customer to the transaction execution and everything in between.
Currently Goalwise provides its users the following services operationally:
- KYC — one cannot invest in the markets if this is not done.
- Transactions — purchase/redeem of mutual funds
- NCT — Non commercial transactions
All these services are provided by different vendors and all of them have their own way of doing things. It is difficult to remember every vendor’s specific requirements and even more tedious to train people on them. Thankfully some of the vendors provide API for some if not all of their services that we consume.
Know Your Client (KYC)
These are done via KYC Registration Agency (KRA). Initially when the volume was not high this process was done manually. With a growth rate of about 10% per month it became very important to figure out a way to effectively handle the volume. It was a prime candidate for streamlining and it started with revisiting the process of activating an account on Goalwise. We realised that it was a multifold task. Internally we needed a system to to verify all the documents that the user has uploaded and from the KRA we needed an API which can be integrated with our system.
There are no set of documents which we could find from the KRA explaining how to do the KYC in detail. So we documented all we had learnt over the past year and built our knowledge base. After having a long discussion with our COO Savitri Bobde, the flow for the account activation and KYC was finalised. We realised it is more important to invest in process than individual. The tech team created an internal tool which enforced the learnings from the knowledge base and integrated the KYC API. The tool worked great and with a little documentation about the process now anyone in the operations team can use the tool to register a new KYC.
Transactions
Transactions are a very critical task. The margin of error for this task is 0. With about thousands of transactions per day (at the time of writing this blog) and only one person allocated to this task, it becomes very important that there is ample support from tech and extremely robust process for uploading the transactions to Registrar & Transfer Agent (RTAs). Thankfully the RTAs do provide APIs for transaction upload which makes the process faster. For smooth execution of transactions, the operations team goes through the verification checklist which includes the current KYC status of every user whose transactions are to be uploaded. In case there are any issues after the transaction has been uploaded to the RTA, they are resolved immediately after discussing with the concerned person at the corresponding AMC team of the RTA.
Non Commercial Transactions (NCTs)
Starting an investment in mutual funds is not the only thing that any customer would require. With time details of the customers would change, say for example when the customer started investing the bank account was in HDFC but now after a job switch it is ICICI. The bank account registered with the AMCs right now is HDFC and upon redeeming, the money would goto the HDFC account. The customer can raise a request online at the Goalwise portal to change the existing bank account with all the AMCs from HDFC to ICICI.
At the moment Goalwise provides the following NCTs:
- Change of bank
- Change of address
- Change of nominee
- Change of contact details
- Change of broker
- Consolidation of folios
All of these services require a lot of form filling and documents. Thankfully these are generated automatically using our internal tools. Creating the filled up forms are the easy part of the process. The difficult part is following up with the every AMC in order to get these application forms processed. The operations team diligently sets remainders and calls up the AMCs to expedite the process for a better user experience.
Operations traditionally in the mutual fund industry has been done offline and still most of it is done in a similar fashion. The RTAs, KRAs and AMCs are slowly adopting technology in their processes. Till the time they catch up it is going to be an uphill battle but we will make sure that our operations team is ready for it everyday
