Wealth Tech Sector Study: A Trust Gap Thesis on Young India's Investing Behavior

Parag set this brief himself. There was no external mandate. He had come from a trading background, had used most of the consumer investing apps in India, and noticed a pattern in his own behavior and that of people around him that he wanted to understand more rigorously.

He designed the research around three questions: what people actually hold across asset classes, whether they feel they have adequate guidance, and what they are willing to pay for advice. Willingness to pay was a deliberate inclusion, because he treated it as the honest test of what people truly value, not just what they say they want.

He built and ran the survey, gathering around 80 responses in roughly a day through BITS alumni groups, friends, and public forums including Reddit. He then cleaned the data and ran the analysis in Python, cutting the responses by behavior and pulling out patterns that held across the set.

From Data to Thesis

The headline findings were clear. The average trust score for investment advice received was 2.1 out of 5. Around 50% of respondents named weak research and lack of guidance as their top frustration. And a notable share reported following influencers they openly said they did not trust.

Parag tested three competing readings of the data before landing on his thesis. One reading pointed to fragmentation: too many apps, and users needed a single aggregator. A second pointed to access: people simply needed more products and asset classes. A third pointed to financial education: users did not know enough about available options.

He stress-tested each against the data. Fragmentation was real, but people were not asking for fewer apps. They were asking for someone to trust. Access was not the constraint either; users had access to multiple asset classes already. And the education reading broke down because even financially literate users still did not trust the guidance they received.

The Non-Consensus Call

The trust reading was the one that survived all three tests. Parag connected it to where VC capital was actually flowing in the sector and found that most funding was concentrated on the affluent and mass-affluent segment, partly driven by SEBI regulations that restrict portfolio management services to investors with holdings above 50 lakhs.

His thesis was that the durable, large business in Indian wealth tech gets built one layer below that, in the mass-market investor segment, where the numbers are larger, the trust gap is real and documented, and the problem is harder but not worse. The market is underpricing that opportunity because it is a harder problem to solve, not because it is a smaller one.

The full findings are written up as a research report, nearing publication.