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Having launched the country’s first stock trading application suite for Facebook, ‘Flip Social’, Geojit BNP Paribas is now eyeing to monetise its expertise in the near future for those interested to develop similar apps.
A. Balakrishnan, Managing Director, Geojit Technologies, said: “At the moment we are planning to retain the IP for our app but we would be looking at monetising our expertise in developing such apps for other brokerages or interested parties who want to launch similar apps for their clientele.”
The application was launched on Wednesday by the BSE Managing Director and CEO, Ashish Kumar Chauhan. Geojit BNP Paribas also held a simultaneous launch in Kochi.
Speaking about Flip Social, C.J. George, Managing Director, Geojit BNP Paribas, said: “Social media has become integral part of the lives of millions and our Facebook page itself has more than 10,000 likes.
“This shows the overwhelming popularity of social media.”
Flip Social aims to tap the potential of Facebook to educate people about investments and make them active investors.
“We believe that with this application, we will be able to draw more informed investors to the Indian capital markets,” added George.
Answering a question, he said Internet trading volumes accounts for 37 per cent of the total trading volumes of Geojit. Of this, 8 per cent has been carried out through mobile trading platform. Many of the days the company has achieved Rs 100 crore daily turnover through mobile trading, he said.
According to Balakrishnan, the idea behind the app is to target young investors so that the primary focus would be on mutual funds and equity investments first before eventually expanding into developing options and derivative products for the more sophisticated investors.
virtual classroom
“Going forward the app will include lot of investor education programmes such as virtual classroom and dictionary on capital markets to help young investors understand the markets.”
The application was developed by Geojit Technologies, a subsidiary of Geojit BNP Paribas, at a cost of about Rs 50 lakh.
At present, the app which resides in Facebook includes investment tutorials, a stock market game that will give players a virtual real time experience of trading in the Indian stock markets and a trading application. To promote the idea further, BSE will sponsor prizes for those who have made the highest notional profit during the week on the Facebook trading game ‘Arthashastra’ on the last trading day of each week.
Actual trading transactions, however, would not be allowed for those users who are not enrolled or registered to trade in the market via KYC norms and in person verification as mandated by existing regulations of the market regulator and exchanges.
“Even if they are registered, trades would only be transacted via their brokers and not users themselves,” added Balakrishnan.
However, given the abysmal levels of retail participation in the markets, not all brokerages are keen to jump on the social media trading app bandwagon as of now.
Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Managing Director and CEO, Destimoney Securities, said: “After we launched our mobile trading app, we have not seen a great response from investors; so we are in no rush to launch a social media app for our broking business. “We would continue to examine how things move.”
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