Jitta to expand paid access to AI-led portfolio analysis

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Jitta to expand paid access to AI-led portfolio analysis

By Asina Pornwasin  
The Nation Weekend

 

Pornthip Kongchun

 

Jiitta plans to launch Jitta Wealth next quarter, and to expand jitta.com to capture more of the overseas market. It also hopes to secure pre-series A funding in the next quarter.

 

Pornthip Kongchun, Jitta co-founder and chief operations officer, says the company now offers two main services – jitta.com for individual investors and Jitta Wealth. 

 

The jitta.com website is a free-of-charge service that aims to attract facilitate individual investors to use jitta.com as tools for their investment portfolio. Jitta Wealth is a paid portfolio service for investors. 

 

Seven stock-exchange markets are available through jitta.com in the US, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, UK and Hong Kong. In 2019, it hopes to increase its information to cover 16 stock markets, covering the majority of the world’s exchanges.

 

The company will expand to oversee markets first with jitta.com services, followed by Jitta Wealth. Singapore and India are two main new markets for jitta.com this year, and local partners there are already helping to build brand awareness in those markets. 

 

Jitta Wealth will then be introduced to those markets.

 

The jitta.com services have been on offer for five years, and the site can boast 150,000 monthly active users, of which around 80 per cent are Thais with the remainder foreigners. In 2019, jitta.com aims to increase active monthly users to 300,000. 

 

A portfolio management service under jitta.com uses an algorithm to recognise and learn investment patterns and returns, and constantly advance the quality of its machine learning and big-data analysis. 

 

The portfolio management is a free service for the 150,000 monthly active users, but so far only about 13 per cent of them are drawing on the function.

 

“We have developed financial big data, which is used to analyse models of investing and investment returns,” said Pornthip.

 

Jitta Wealth is a private fund, and Jitta is expected to soon acquire a licence. Jitta Wealth also uses the jitta.com’s algorithm to manage the private fund. 

 

Given that Jitta Wealth mostly uses technology in its fund management, it can offer lower-cost management fees and profit commission fees than traditional private funds. It charges a management fee of 0.5 per cent per year per investment value, and 10 per cent as its profit commission fee.

 

“Jitta.com does not generate revenue for us,” said Pornthip. “We focus on delivering stock information for investors’ consideration to manage their investment portfolio. Our revenue will come from Jitta Wealth, as a wealth management service run by automated investment using technology.”

 

According to the Bank of Thailand, Thai people who have money in their saving accounts worth between Bt1 million to Bt25 million together account for Bt4.6 trillion.

 

This group of around 1.5 million people are the targeted customers for Jitta Wealth.

 

Jitta Wealth is scheduled to offer services in the second quarter of 2019. Last year, two asset management service providers, Phillip Capital Thailand and Merchant Partners, partnered with Jitta to use Jitta’s information to manage their private investment funds for their customers. These two partners will be partners in Jitta Wealth. 

 

“We will have a back-end system, and they will oversee funds and trading,” said Pornthip.

 

The goal of Jitta Wealth is to have over 1,000 customers by the end of 2019. 

 

“We will gradually grow in acquiring customers for Jitta Wealth, since we need to educate the market,” he said.

 

Jitta Wealth will first target jitta.com’s 150,000 users. To use Jitta Wealth, people are required to make an investment of at least Bt1 million. 

 

The Jitta Wealth service is run and operated by Jitta Wealth, a subsidiary of Jitta and will initially offer services for Thais to invest in three stock exchange markets – Thailand, the US and Vietnam.

 

Jitta plans to raise its pre-series A funding in the first quarter of 2019. The investment will go to expanding both jitta.com and Jitta Wealth in the country and the overseas market over the next couple of years, as well as to increase resources by 50 per cent from the current about 20 people to around 30 people in 2019. 

 

“We do not need to double our staff since we focus on automation investment systems with technology. We will add more people in sales, marketing, service and support, as well as operations where we need engineers to develop advanced machine learning and big data analytics,” said Pornthip.

 

The mission of Jitta is to offer technology to facilitate people worldwide to reach value investment information. 

 

“We started with the middle income people who have savings of at least Bt1 million to utilise their wealth,” said Pornthip. “In the future, we will expand to help people who have less than Bt1 million of savings to utilise their wealth by using Jitta technology and algorithms.”

 

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/Startup_and_IT/30362102

 

 

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