Micro-investment is the foundation of the change investing concept. These fintechs keep track of your expenditure. Every time you spend money on something, whether it’s clothes, food, or anything else, they encourage you to invest a tiny bit in assets.
Small sums of money, known as change money, can be invested in assets ranging from digital gold and mutual funds to US stocks.
Workings
These fintech apps round off an amount—call let’s it Rs 10, Rs 50, or Rs 100–to the next Rs 10, Rs 50, or Rs 100, depending on what they offer and what you select.
When you use your debit card or net banking account to purchase something, the applications calculate the difference between the amount you’ve just spent and the nearest roundoff number.
When you spend money on other types of transactions, the difference is added up, and when it reaches, say, Rs 100, Rs 500, or Rs 1,000, the app nudges you to invest it in a financial asset on its platform.
Niyo app
To use Niyo‘s change investing service, you must first open a NiyoX savings account after downloading the app. The bank tracks your savings account expenditure via net banking, debit cards, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) transactions and accumulates change for investing. When your corpus reaches a specific size, you can invest it in a mutual fund.
You can modify the mutual fund scheme on the app at any moment to invest the corpus created with the Save the Change feature. If you do not change the mutual fund, your money will be invested in the same fund every time your corpus reaches a certain threshold.
Appreciate
Appreciate requires your permission to read your transactions by SMS in order to use its change investing feature. Appreciate keeps track of your spending using online banking, UPI, mobile wallets, and debit cards linked to its apps. When you spend money, the app will round it up to the nearest Rs 10 and withdraw the difference from your bank account to invest.
Your change is immediately placed in a portfolio of US stocks determined by our unique AI algorithm based on your risk profile via the Appreciate app.
To work toward your financial goals, you can opt to save on a daily or monthly basis. After signing up and completing the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, you can begin investing. The app is now under beta testing, but it will soon be available to all potential investors.
Jar
Depending on your preferences, you can choose to have Jar automatically round off your daily costs to the next Rs 5 or Rs 10.
For example, if your daily spending is Rs 93, Jar will invest either Rs 2 or Rs 7 in digital gold on your behalf.
They put their daily savings into digital gold. Assume you made ten transactions in a single day; they will track all of these by SMS, accumulate the change, and debit your associated bank account for investment.
In conclusion
Change investing is a new notion in India, as are these fintech apps. Although these apps encourage you to invest little amounts, such investments will not help you generate money in the long run.
Millennial investors, whom these apps are aimed at, must also master the fundamentals of financial investment and diverse assets.
It is critical to understand where your money is invested. Potential clients should inquire about the fintechs’ plans to expand asset classes in the future so that they can diversify. Don’t be swayed by marketing campaigns that offer to save simply Rs 5 or Rs 10 each transaction and multiply it by a lakh.
