Samco Securities to invest over 20 cr on technology

Samco Securities, a discount broking firm has set up a technology R&D center in Chennai and plans to infuse a capital of around Rs. 20 cr in the next two years to build the technology infrastructure. “Our expansion plans also include hiring of 100+ people in 12-15 months and 200+ in 2 years while our current technology team size is around 60,” says Pratik Adani, CTO, SAMCO securities in an interview with Express Computer Online


What’s your role given the nature of the discount broking business?
At Samco we strongly believe in 2 things for our customers, to create long term wealth and to make sure our customers do not lose money. We significantly believe, that huge opportunity exists in solving both these problems. There are several questions that remain unanswered from a customer point of view and we truly believe the industry, our competition and us are still far off from truly delivering excellent customer value that solves these problems. We have an existing base of over 1 lakh customers and we hope to increase our pie with each passing year.

Technology is single most important piece that can help us achieve the above things and as a CTO it is my responsibility that we keep building new products and enhance the current ones to make sure that we are future ready.

Please elaborate on the R&D centre set up in Chennai
We have set up a technology R&D center in Chennai and we plan to infuse a capital of around Rs. 20 cr in the next two years to build the technology infrastructure. Our expansion plans also include hiring of 100+ people in 12-15 months and 200+ in 2 years while our current technology team size is around 60. We arrived at the decision of setting up shop in Chennai after careful consideration of multiple cities and centers like Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad. Chennai stood out on several parameters – great culture and dedication, excellent talent pool, higher stability and reasonable costs. We hope to build great products, services from the Chennai center which can solve our consumer problems.

What’s your USP, when compared to Zerodha, 5Paisa, Upstox and Trade Smart Online
Most of our competitors are concentrating on providing an execution-based platform. When a customer comes to their platform they assume that they know what they want to buy or sell. We on the other hand, are making all our products in a way where besides being an excellent execution platform we get involved in decision making for the customer. Our Stocknote and RANKMF platforms are testament of this philosophy where we help our customers by using tech driven proprietary products to take an informed decision. Our Giga trading engine provides auto-generated research so our clients can be abreast with the latest information as soon as it is out. Also, our Smart SIP is another asset which allows investors to make automatic adjustments to market volatility along with the traditional SIPs to make higher returns compared to the traditional SIP. MosDex considers the margin of safety of stocks before investing. All these technology systems are proprietary to Samco which makes us unique.

What kind of emerging technologies is the company using to enable traders?
We are using a lot of Big Data analytics and Machine learning technologies to analyse, process and give our customers real time actionable insights using which they can trade with ease. The idea is to shield the customers from millions of data points and just give them relevant information which is personalised rather than generic info, using which they can quickly decide and take action. We have also built technology systems which are used in RankMF ratings and Stock ratings, thus enabling the best trading and investment ideas to our clients.