Alum Ventures: Gumption Labs – Anurag Saboo, PGP 1996
The need to seek and to do better, fine the art is what drives us all. Some individuals take the extra step and foray into the unknown not just for the adventure alone but also to gain an upper edge simultaneously paving a path of opportunities for others. Anurag Saboo is certainly one of those individuals, he ventured into the field of Fintech when people hadn’t even heard of such a thing. Gumption Labs and FundExpert are two companies co-founded by Anurag and has gained deep knowledge of the subject over the years and is one of the finest financial trainers in the country.
An exclusive interview with Anurag Saboo about his entrepreneurial journey, inspiration, and message for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Q. Please tell us something about yourself.
I have been an Entrepreneur all my life. I am an Electrical and Electronics Engineer from IIT Chennai and an MBA from IIM Bangalore. I was awarded a Gold medal for topping my class at IIT. In 24 + years of my career, I have co-founded startups in SAAS, Manufacturing and eCommerce Solutions. I have been awarded Certified Market Technician (CMT) degree by CMT Association, USA, CFP (Chartered Financial Planner) by FPSB, USA, and CFTe (Chartered Financial Technician) by IFTA, UK.
I am also passionate about teaching, learning and following Financial Planning, Investing, Trading, Market Analytics, Algorithmic Investing and Trading. I am also passionate about working with data science technologies such as AI, ML and its applications in various domains.
I am currently passionately driving my Fintech Startup to build World-class Wealth Tech platforms for leading Financial institutions and advisors and investors.
Q. What was the idea behind the conception of Gumption Labs?
Gumption means to Dare. So it was fitting that conceiving Gumption, a fintech startup in 2012 when fintech was not even heard of and the buzzword in startup world was the only ECommerce and related stuff, was indeed a daring move. And the idea came from a personal pain point of having seen my parents facing sub-standard biased financial advisory. So we realized that due to the dearth of time or knowledge, financial investors in India fail to track their existing investments and end up getting serviced by substandard advisors. Quality Advisors relied on traditional pen and paper approach or primitive technologies, so get caught up in transactional work and therefore reserve their services to select HNIs. So, these facts led us to built fintech solutions addressing the aforementioned challenges.
Q. What are the different products/ services offered by Gumption Labs?
At Gumption, we have developed an array of algorithm-based SAAS solutions that empower both investors and advisors. Our first offering is TradersCockpit – a Direct Equity Advisory Algorithmic Tools Platform helping DIY Investors by mining humongous data, helping them track their portfolio and make more informed decisions. Our next offering is FundExpert, a platform that transforms a normal financial advisor into a Digital Enabled Advisor within a day. It enables the users of the advisors to transact, manage and monitor all their investments by seamlessly aggregating them in a single place. It allows quality advisors to take benefit of robo advisory solution, automating customer onboarding and freeing the Advisors to scale their offerings and serve more customers at a lower cost. Today over 1.5 lakhs retail users use both the platforms and some of the marque names like Stockholding Corporation, Edelweiss, Bajaj Finserv and Kotak Bank have deployed our software platform for their users.
Q. What are the advantages of using an AI-based platform compared to conventional methods?
The biggest advantage of AI-based platform compared to conventional methods is overcoming ingrained human biases in decision making, AI has been effective at structuring large data sets comprising billions of records, to come out with decision making, predictive analytics and eliminating human emotions and biases in the process. The AI-based platform also is capable of altering its decision-making rules by autonomously reacting to the changes perceived by it whereas a conventional platform will need human intervention for the same.
Q. Is the current time a good opportunity to enhance one’s portfolio? What your advice?
Yes, absolutely, there is no doubt that the current adverse time is a good opportunity to enhance one’s portfolio. In fact, I firmly believe that opportunity lies in adversity and the best opportunities for long term outperformance will be found in these times.
Q. What aspect of entrepreneurship attracted you the most?
For me, Entrepreneurship is all about bringing to fruition your vision and your passion. Being an Entrepreneur, it liberated me from conforming to someone else’s norms and it gave me the freedom to give full expression to the ideas which called me. So, that’s what attracted me to being a career Entrepreneur.
Q. What does success mean to you?
My definition of success means achieving 360 degrees of success in all spheres of your life -basically attaining the right balance of the materialistic achievements without letting go of your personal life or breaking down the work-life balance. If you do achieve spectacular success materialistically, the world will celebrate your success but you wouldn’t if it came at huge personal cost.
Q. Best advice you ever got?
One of the best advice I ever got was that to be an effective leader, one needs to listen more than talk, think more than act, and need to be self-less more than self-centered.
Q. Your message for alums who want to take to the entrepreneurial path.
My message to alums would be that don’t take the entrepreneurial path just for money or glamour but do it for creating or providing goods/services that call you. You will need a lot of perseverance to traverse this path as it is going to be a long journey and that perseverance only comes from a cause within.
Website link to Gumption Labs: http://www.gumptionlabs.com/
Website link to FundExpert: https://www.fundexpert.in/
