In the financial world, information is money. And before we decide to invest, we need to learn more about the company in order to make an educated decision. Heckyl, an Indian-based start-up, helps to make financial information and fact-finding about a stock, FOREX or commodity really simple. It’s basically an investment help tool that aggregates content in real-time from social platforms (Twitter, YouTube, blogs), online news publishers, and analyst reports. (Screenshots below)
The tool is specifically built for brokerage firms in India and we’re told that there are about 20 of them serving over 18 million investors in the country. Users can access these information for free through the brokerage firm’s online platform. There is also an option for them to gain additional insights if they pay a monthly subscriber fee. The brokerage firm and Heckyl will do a revenue share at 20:80 ratio.
Heckyl has so far partnered with three brokerage firms which gives them a good 500,000 users head start. It is growing very quickly and I was told that the one million users milestone is soon approaching as well.
That’s a quite a few users to start. But I was curious why investors in India didn’t just use Yahoo Finance when doing research? The founders told me that many layman investors do use Yahoo Finance but also said that unfortunately Yahoo doesn’t have much information about the Indian financial market (see below).
Oops!
Logging on to different sites when researching a stock is cumbersome and slow. And the expensive Bloomberg terminal obviously isn’t something that every layman investor can afford. So Heckyl came in to narrow the information gap in the financial market in India.
The team looks solid too. All four Heckyl’s founders used to work as banking engineers at Merrill Lynch prior to taking on this entrepreneur route. The folks built the product in the last two year while they paid for bread and bills with their own savings and a small investment from a friend. With the product now ready, the team is hunting for brokerage firms to work with. They added:
The partnership with the first brokerage firm took us about three months to seal the deal. The second one took about two months and the third one about one month. It gets easier as more firms come on board.
From what I have understood, Heckyl is looking to add a killer feature very soon. There should be some good news coming from the team as they seek for more mega partnerships and investment money in order to scale faster, and expanding to markets like the U.S, U.K, China, and Singapore.
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