Over the years, investment products such as mutual funds, ULIPs have continued to interest consumers. However, the number of people who are genuinely satisfied with their investment portfolio amount is not much. There are multiple reasons for this — and one of the main reasons is that the consumer is the last point of focus, affecting the consumers negatively and taking a huge toll on their investments. While the momentum is increasing in terms of investments, the investment population of India is still low largely due to the age-old practices being followed by big conglomerates.

In order to understand the consumer’s needs and give advice or solution, Jarvis came into the picture in December 2016. Jarvis is an artificial intelligence and machine learning based equity model that only provides a complete understanding of the consumer but also provides for a personalised portfolio.

However, due to the complicated nature of the product, the brains behind Jarvis had to be sure before making it available to the retail audience. They spent a good amount of time (nearly a year and a half) on research and development that included multiple pilots run in between consumers and other stakeholders.

“It was nearly a year ago that we finally drew up a final road map for the product and the rest is history! We are doing well, and we are hoping to scale up even further and meet up to our desired targets,” said Sumit Chanda, Co-Founder of Jarvis.

Using Machine Learning To Eliminate The Emotional Aspect

The equity market is more or less an area that runs on high emotions. And this is why 98% of people of the entire investing population end up losing money and only 2% makes money because they use logic and practical approach.

“Most people who invest in the market have a particular affiliation towards a stock. If I am working in a particular company that is listed on the market, I have a certain emotional connection with the company that directly influences my decision to buy that particular stock. And this is exactly where people falter!” said Chanda.

Investing in the stock market should be a solely logical decision. And Jarvis is embarking on a journey to eliminate the emotional bias that consumers face while investing. Jarvis is accessible to every investor and eliminates most of the “risks” that are involved. The unbiased nature of the product allows a robust risk management system that provides the consumer with correct data-backed information.

Jarvis consumes information given by the customer to derive an individual portfolio that best suit the consumer’s needs and risk-taking capability. Each consumer is unique; thus, a singular strategy may not necessarily work for all consumers. So, Jarvis feeds all this necessary information to the machine and uses a set of complex algorithms to generate a customised portfolio for all consumer. And this customised portfolio is as good as a model portfolio since it takes into account multiple parameters and is not a result of an emotionally induced decision. There is no human intervention — right from fund creation to execution to risk management – everything is completely automated and run on artificial intelligence.

“At Jarvis, we thoroughly understand consumer expectations and preferences that help us curate individual portfolios for all our consumers. Therefore, if I have 10,000 investors on my platform, I will 10,000 different portfolios,” Chanda added.

Talking about the risk management system or Jarvis, it is the only one available in the equity markets for long-term investors. It is a machine learning based risk management system and is robust. Jarvis’s risk management analyses the bearish and bullish phase of the stocks and recommends when to hold on to/buy the stock and when to sell it, helping investors to make sizeable profits or minimize their overall losses.

The Roadmap Ahead

Talking about the competition in the market, Chanda believes that anyone in the business of fund management is a competitor. However, if we narrow down, Jarvis’ competitors primarily consist of start-ups in the fund management space, mutual fund robo-advisors, robo ETS, personal finance management companies etc. Also, even though there are companies who are creating and managing funds, what makes Jarvis unique and better than its competitors is the product works on customization with equity products.

Going ahead, Jarvis has a big road map for its product. The company believes that investors who have a sizeable corpus to invest, have limited exposure to international stocks. And this is where Jarvis is making a move — it is trying to create a business model that allows investors to trade in domestic or international stocks or both. That is not all, it is also trying to build a robust MF distributor model so that they can start distributing Jarvis.