The two
college buddies - Neeraj Choksi and Jignesh Desai started NJ India in 1994. Today
NJ India employs 1000 people having more than 15,000 IFAs empanelled with it.
The duo share their initial journey, challenges and their success mantra in a
two part interview with Cafemutual.
Tell us about your early days. How the idea of creating NJ came about?
We were friends since our college days. After studies, we felt that there was an unmet demand for
professionals to cater to the growing financial advisory services industry. The
financial advisory services industry was at a nascent stage and most of the
savings were invested in traditional products to preserve capital, and not for
wealth creation. We saw a big
opportunity in the financial advisory services space - in helping people to
create wealth in the long term. With this idea, we started NJ IndiaInvest in 1994. This coincided with the opening of the mutual
fund business to private players.
Right from our initial days, we have had a strong conviction that mutual funds are the most suitable investment vehicle for savings for the retail investors.
The
first few were ‘learning’ years when we dabbled with ideas. Business was also challenging. Because of the bad experience of Mastergain /
Morgan Stanley people were not receptive at all to mutual funds. We used to get
hardly any subscriptions into mutual funds then and were only meeting ends to
survive. In spite of all challenges, we were confident that staying long in the business will help us grow.
What kind of challenges did you face in your initial days?
There were many challenges. The customers' attitude towards non-traditional financial products particularly mutual funds post the Morgan Stanley/ Master Gain era and lack of awareness were the big challenges then, even though they still persist today. The other challenge was attracting and retaining talent, given our lack of financial strength and brand. Many manufacturers then didn't take us seriously and we often had a hard time registering as brokers with them. Personally for both of us, it was huge learning in every aspect of business - be it sales, research, people, finance or technology. We are glad today that we went through the process the hard way.
How the idea of creating sub-broker model did came to you?We got our initial success by directly engaging
with our customers. We had worked hard on designing the recipe to service
/advise customers and promote goal based financial planning and offering mutual
funds as a suitable investment vehicle.
However expanding the customer base was a big
challenge.
We were eager and aggressive in our approach and we wanted to reach clients across India. However, we felt that such growth on our own would be difficult and would need lot of time, effort and resources. At the same time, we also sensed an opportunity to provide business support to IFAs so that they could grow business by effective use of
technology. The idea of a sub-broker model was a perfect match that gave birth to “NJ Fundz Network” which is
now “NJ Wealth Advisors Network” in the year 2003.
How did you initially convince IFAs to join you? Was there any resistance?
There was no value proposition in real terms
being offered to financial advisors by the competition. Most of the
distribution houses were competing only on pricing. In that scenario we thought
of creating a platform which focuses on helping the IFA build his business.
Initially it was difficult to convince IFAs of our offering. Some were also sceptical of the model and the capability of a Surat based financial services company. There was low awareness of mutual funds at that time and we really had to educate and
