Perfios helps professionals manage finance

BANGALORE, INDIA: Perfios was started around 2 years back. It launched its first product called Perfios Software Solutions, about six months back. In a chat with CIOL, V.R. Govindarajan (Govi), co-founder and director of Perfios, shared his thoughts about the product, competition and the road map. Excerpts:

What was the idea behind launching Perfios Software Solutions? Could you share something about the product?

The idea of having a wealth/asset manager originated from the personal pain points of the team itself — from the issues we faced in managing and tracking the financial transactions. A lot of working professionals in India still use spreadsheet and tables to manage and calculate their finance.

And we realized that a wealth manager was the single solution to this common problem. This is a web-based application that enables users to analyze and understand their personal finance. It is an automated process which accepts data from various sources and feeds to the manager. Users can forward/upload any statement to populate their accounts.

How do you meet the challenges of security and access issues?

We understand the security concerns involved, therefore we partnered with TrustGuard. It runs more than 30,000 vulnerability tests every day on our site to ensure that Perfios is a secure application. We also use the security certificate from Verisign that enables us to transfer data securely to and from users machine.

A major feature in our product is that the credentials uploaded are never stored on our servers but are encrypted and stored on the systems locally.

Also, Perfios is a read-only application, which gives complete control for users. Because of this, we encourage our users to share only their read-only password and not their transaction password.

What would be forthcoming developments in this product?

At present, Perfios software solution is a completely free service. Going forward, we plan to introduce the premium accounts. Under this, the vanilla features would be available for free, while we would charge for the value-added services.

As the usage increases, we would continue introducing new features in the base offering. In terms of access, we do have mobile offering, but are in the process of developing better platform and also widgets for mobile and desktops platforms for quick access.

You also were a co-founder of Aztecsoft, a software servicing company which was later acquired by MindTree. What were the major learnings from Aztecsoft?

Aztecsoft was founded in 1995 primarily as a products company, by S Parthasarathy and me. Over a period of time, we realized a lot of issues in penetrating a different market as a products company. We therefore moved to services and outsourced product development firm. But my core interest has always been to run a products company. Perfios is a wish come true.

What would be your go-to market strategy? Would domestic market be your core focus ? How do you see the global markets?

We have a b2c approach to the product. Our target customers are working professionals/businessmen, and every taxpayer who needs sophisticated tool to manage his/her accounts finances.

Having said that, a large chunk of the business is expected to come from our partners like insurance, banking, mutual fund and other financial institutions. They would be the early adopters of the products and help spread the product their clients, which are the individual tax-payers. We have also industry partnership with companies like Wipro, where all employees are invited to open up their free accounts and manage their finances.

Talking about the market, we see that India is a huge market. For the next 3-4 years, our clear focus is on the domestic market. We have set a goal to reaching one million users in the next three years. Since US and Europe are matured markets, going by our strategy of exploiting the untapped markets, we see South-East Asia as the next frontier for expansion.

There are a couple of similar products in the market like Intuit Money Manager and ArthaMoney Manager. How do you see the competition?

The presence of competition validates that we are in the right direction. Our product is secure, free and it provides the 360 view of the finance management. Its unique features like import and export of the data, uploads, security and automated services give it edge over other options. I am looking forward to wide acceptance of the product among the users.