Sharekhan Just Went Bollywood! Launches MoneyFLIX, World’s First Financial Movies Platform

Sharekhan Education, a separate entity under Sharekhan, one of the largest brokerage houses in India, has unveiled its maiden edutainment platform - MoneyFLIX - to lead a digital revolution in financial education in the country.

Catering to both, the digitally native millennials and the not so millennial, the platform will offer financial modules with a generous sprinkle of entertainment that aims to keep viewers engaged and hooked. Learning through entertainment and stories is not an entirely novel concept. In fact, it has been part of our tradition for ages, in the form of epics, fables and parables, driving home key values. Teaching consumers about money through ‘edutainment’ seems like an effective way to demystify a complicated subject by using compelling and familiar concepts.

MoneyFLIX’s purpose is to educate and help both, new to market and experienced investors & traders to better understand finance and consequently enable them to better take advantage of financial market opportunities. 

To start with, the platform already has nearly 100 videos ranging from being as small as 5 minutes in duration to almost up to 30 minutes in duration and this number is set to double within the first year itself. These movies cover topics from the simplest Investing principles all the way upto complex trading strategies in a bollywood styled manner.

Embedded with key features such as subtitling in local languages, the ability to capture voice notes on the go & easy references to important points by the click of a button, this state of the art edutainment platform has many technology offerings and thus expects to improve learning and retention.

On the occasion, Rahul Ghose who heads MoneyFLIX said: “The integration of technology in the financial services industry has been radical in uplifting customer experience. However efforts towards literacy have often been complex and hence, the idea was to create content that even millennials resonate with.

This is a significant step that emboldens the ideology and commitment to empower retail investors in the market. This new digital-first endeavour would help us take investing and trading education to even the remotest parts of the country.”

MoneyFLIX ’s yearly subscription for the platform will be at a special price of Rs 1,990+G.S.T. and the monthly subscription will be at Rs 990+G.S.T. Subscribers will have access to the entire premium content of the platform as well as access to 10min video snippets on fundamentals of trending companies, called MoneyFLIX Bytes. MoneyFLIX has ensured something for everybody - anyone who walks through the site will get to enjoy and learn from a vast pool of free movies and tutorials on Trading and investing.

MoneyFLIX APP is available on Google PlayStore.

iOS – App to be released in the end of the year

About Sharekhan Education:

Started over a decade back in the year 2010, our unique approach towards professional financial education helps create a distinctive learning platform for traders as well as investors and help them learn the skills necessary to trade and invest confidently like the professionals. Over the course of the last decade we had over 100,000 people from various walks of life who have attended our workshops and have trained more than 17000 people across the country.

We set up our first education center in Mumbai and since then we have expanded to 6 locations across the country namely, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai and New Delhi with traders & investors having experienced our unique hands-on education across the country. Our courses cover a spectrum of trading styles and asset classes. One can learn Short Term Trading, Swing Trading, Position Trading & Pro active Investing, using an array of asset classes namely stocks, options, futures and currencies.

About Sharekhan  

Sharekhan has been founded in 2000 and is a full subsidiary of BNP Paribas, a leading European banking institution. Sharekhan services more than 20 lakh clients aggregating more than 45,848 Cr of assets*, operates via 142 branches all over India and more than 3050 franchisees. It provides equity & derivatives execution, DP services, Portfolio Management, Mutual Funds & Corporate Deposits. Sharekhan executes on average more than 8 lakh trades/day** and performed more than 170 CR trades since inception.

*AUM as of 30th June 2020

**Trades as average in Q1 of 2020

Open Source technologies now sought by Wall Street companies

Economic slowdown had a huge impact on the financial institutions around the world. Recession has forced these financial institutions to take a look at their budget as well as the technology that they are using. In times like this open source technology is growing in the capital markets because of increased cost pressures. Many Wall Street companies are now adopting open source even though there are many who still believe that any software that they develop is proprietary and has a competitive edge.

"What the crisis has done is shattered the orthodoxy in what is accepted as the correct way to build out systems, and it has allowed people to think more creatively about how their software works," comments Graham Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Marketcetera, an open source platform for building automated trading systems to Wall Street and Technology. Many banks and brokers have been running open source applications like Linux and the free Apache web servers in the back office. Now, open source is finding its way to the front office trading desk as well.

Many open source companies are booming in times like these. One such example is Esper, which provides an open-source event stream processing and complex event processing (CEP) solution. Esper is already built. Instead of being a standalone server product that runs as a separate product, it's a library that companies can link in with their own proprietary stuff.

Recently, many Wall Street IT developers have started participating in open source technology projects. Firms like Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Borse Systems participated in the open source (AMQP) Advanced Message Queing (popular open source project among the financial services industry) Working Group and collaborated on standards for messaging infrastructure. "AMQP is not just a financial service [project], but it's something that has been taken seriously in the financial services space. Tough economy has opened the growth of open source. You get your base products for free, and you're essentially getting innovation in that product for free, because people are contributing and improving the software all the time," said Kevin McPartland, Senior Analyst at TABB Group to Wall Street and Technology.

Cost still remains the most important reason especially when many major vendors have increased the licensing fees of their product. Buying a Trading system from a vendor will require lengthy and costly customization. "We've built out a platform product that provides out-of-the-box components for market data, signal analysis engines, market connectivity and user interface capabilities to exchanges, ECNs, brokers and lots of different destinations," says Miller. Marketcetera launched Version 1.0 of its Trading Platform, which can be downloaded free-of-charge from its Web site. They have tried to follow Red Hat way of providing fee-based service and support. The company integrates several open-source technologies including QuickFIX/J, a messaging engine for the FIX protocol, and QuantLib, a free library for quantitative finance and Esper.

However, despite open source company's claim many experts doubt that open source is cheaper than software vendors. Custom development of open source software can be more costly than proprietary software. "It might look cheaper on paper but if you look at what you want to do with it, and it requires a substantial engineering effort rather than a commercial product, then it's not necessarily the most effective solution," says Adam Honore, Senior Analyst at Aite Group. He further adds that there could be support, maintenance and accountability issues with some open source vendors.

Agencies