MUMBAI: News Corp owned personal financial advice platform BigDecisions.com has empowered 900,000 users to make informed financial decisions.
The announcement has come as the platform unveiled its full suite of new, free-to-use, data-backed personal finance advice tools, along with insightful articles and videos.
BigDecisions helps users prudently plan for their retirement, the education of their children, assessing their life and health insurance needs, and helping them to benefit from transferring their home loans. In addition, the platform also helps users decide whether to rent or buy a home, a critical decision amid a stagnant real-estate market in India. The platform uniquely uses Big Data, such as healthcare costs across India and sample household expense data over 20 years, to calculate likely inflation for retirement planning, while enabling users arrive at more realistic and actionable next steps with simple-to-use tools.
In the nine months since News Corp acquired BigDecisions.com, the platform has had 700,000 different users take advantage of its tools and insights. The number of visitors per month has increased to 400,000 from under 50,000 in January.
“Sources of financial empowerment based on unbiased information and smart analytics have been few and far between in India,” said Manish Shah, Co-Founder and CEO, BigDecisions.com. “The quality of content, the wealth of impartial data backed insights and the ease of use make it an engagement worthy experience for our users who see immense value in our offerings.”
For example, BigDecisions allows users to figure out how much health insurance they need based on family structure and treatment costs in their city. It relies on a sophisticated, behind-the-scenes algorithm that assigns a probability to each member of the family falling ill, helping assess an appropriate amount of health-insurance coverage for the family. Users are then free to choose where and how they want to acquire such insurance, from a variety of vetted, licensed third-party product providers. All this happens online, at a user’s convenience and with full data privacy, and without the product-sales pitches that are commonplace in India with sales of such products.
“We have designed tools that are easy to navigate, with information that is easy to find and act upon,” said Gaurav Roy, Co-Founder and Product Head. “Our new platform, with its improved usability on the phone, enables us to expand our user base into Tier II and Tier III towns as well.”
The majority of BigDecisions.com users currently come from the top 8 cities of India.
“The early response to BigDecisions.com validates our belief that Indian consumers are looking for unbiased and accurate advice, as well as user-friendly calculators,” said Raju Narisetti, Senior Vice-President, Strategy, News Corp. “A vibrant digital India needs financially empowered citizens who can rely on trusted sources in their journey to financial prosperity.”
As part of its roadmap, BigDecisions plans to combine its data-backed insights with peer-to-peer shared user experiences (for instance, “people similar to you did this”) to enhance decision-making for its users, as well as work with banking, asset management, insurance and other financial services companies in India to create tailored solutions aimed at educating and empowering users.
