Conversations with a Product Developer and Investment Evangelist
There have been many initiatives to bring the traditional world of equity markets on a Blockchain. Once that happens in a smooth manner, the disruption would have come into effect and a whole new paradigm will open-up in the field of personal finance and capital market investments.
“Over the next decade, there will be disruptions as significant as Internet, where Blockchain will disrupt industries, one being CapitalMarkets and WallStreet.”
-Patrick M. Byrne
Episode 3 of this Special Series
The conversations in this episode of our special series — Women in Blockchain — brings to light this new area of disruption through the eyes of a young start-up entrepreneur — Smriti Tomar — who started her own investment at a very young age, probably in her teens.
She borrowed her father’s demat / trading account to put her internship money to good use. This, plus her being a big fan of Warren Buffet’s style of investments, piqued her interest further while she was in her engineering college. Mixed with Blockchain, she has now started her Fintech journey and is creating a new ecosystem for investments in stock markets.
This episode will hopefully open up a new perspective to investments, equity markets, personal finance and investments in the traditional stock market on a Blockchain.
Our Guest - Smriti Tomar, Founder CEO, InvestoAsia
Smriti Tomar describes herself as a product engineer, entrepreneur, fintech developer, and blockchain enthusiast and as the Founder CEO of Invacia Labs Pvt. Ltd, she is working towards building “InvestoAsia”, that will revolutionize the way investments are done into various asset classes.
A big fan of Warren Buffet, her entrepreneurial journey started when she was able to help a bunch of Korean investors to invest in Indian equity markets. This triggered the bug and she began exploring deeper into this opportunity.
With InvestoAsia, Smriti has come up with a solution that will cut transaction costs and bring about a seamlessly efficient system using blockchain technology to digitize assets and further trade them on a private platform. This will give everyone a fair chance of investing across borders, and not just a few accredited ones.
She is devoted to and aims to excel in three areas which strengthen each other:
- Marketing and product management;
- Creating a financial investment venture that better serves customers profitably;
- Women’s business success.
Some salient points of our conversation
We had some interesting conversations with Smriti. She had a lot to share and there were some critical and valid points made by her:
- There are many methods for people outside India to invest in India, but the process is bureaucratic complex and time consuming for a retail investor from overseas.
- One does not really have to work all through life, there are ways to invest and start generating passive incomes.
- Personal finance in India is such a luxury; only 3% of people invest in the stock market and the rest are missing out on a golden opportunity.
- 25% of people are financially literate in India, not many people know about value investing
- A huge population in India is unbanked and financially excluded from the economy
- There are two kinds of investing — Active — things like stocks, commodity, etc., in which one actively invests usually for a short term, and Passive — financial instruments like ETFs, index funds, where the money is parked for a long term
- Investments should be as easy for the people as they are. She quoted Warren Buffet here saying that “only a fool can lose money in stocks”.
- This technology suits the best for India and unfortunately is not catching up faster than should be
- The true potential of blockchain gets unleashed with crypto; however, the entire sector got derailed or put down by the numerous scams, fake projects, pump-and-dump schemes when ICOs were in vogue
- She also sends out a message to the women — It is not a crime to start from zero, but to not start at all surely is.
About Hard Fork 'Specials'
Hard Fork Specials is a shorter version of our talk show which we will undertake from time to time. These short and special series of episodes will highlight either a burning or important topic, a new technology, special set of people or something special to showcase the Crypto and Blockchain scene in India as well as overseas.
Women in Blockchain is the first of these specials.
- Watch the Season 1 here: Hard Fork Season 1
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