Yubi Invest, a fixed income investment platform for corporate bond issuance and investment by institutional and retail investors, expects to achieve ₹20,000 crore worth of transactions in the current fiscal. The platform is hoping to attract retail investors by making bond market investing as simple as buying or selling shares. 

A B2B2C platform, Yubi Invest is part of Chennai-based Yubi, an online marketplace that facilitates debt financing for corporates by connecting lenders and investors with borrowers. Its product suite includes Yubi Loans, Yubi Co.Lend, Yubi Flow, Yubi Pools, and Yubi Build that covering a whole gamut of credit products such as loans, co-lending, corporate bond issuance, supply chain financing, asset-backed securitisation and RE and Infra financing.

Platform for pros

Yubi Invest is designed for wealth management firms and financial advisors, who invest on corporate debt papers on behalf of their clients. The platform simplifies fixed-income transactions in a unified and streamlined manner for better investor experience.

Currently, investment managers and wealth advisors manually invest on corporate bonds based on the investment amount, tenor and risk appetite of their clients. Yubi Invest, on the other hand, will enable them to discover a diverse set of fixed-income instruments covering a wide range of industries and ratings under one single platform. It will also enable investment managers to do portfolio analytics of their clients, track maturity dates of bonds, plan reinvestments among others. 

Speaking to businessline, Moulik Patel, Chief Business Officer of Yubi Invest, said retail investors today are aware of only fixed deposits when it comes to fixed income products while many are not aware of products like non-convertible debentures (NCDs). He attributed the low retail participation in the fixed income market to lack of product awareness, operational challenges and absence of easy investing options, like in the case of the equity market. 

He said retail participation in the debt market is at the cusp of a revolution after SEBI’s recent move reducing the face value of privately placed debt securities to ₹1 lakh (from ₹10-lakh earlier).

New products

At present, Yubi Invest offers investment in NCDs. It plans to add products like corporate fixed deposits, gold ETFs and alternate investment funds (AIFs).

Gaurav Kumar, Founder and CEO of Yubi, said, fixed income assets, which were traditionally limited to large national players, will become more democratised over the next three to four years by empowering the wealth partner and financial advisor ecosystem to offer a seamless experience for investors.