
Grip is making such high yield fixed income investment options available to investors by solving both – low minimum ticket size and great user experience
Most investors in India are presented with opportunities such as fixed deposits, small savings accounts, mutual funds, stock markets and even cryptocurrency. While market-linked investment options have a component of volatility and must have an appropriate allocation in the portfolio, the fixed income options don’t always offer real inflation-adjusted returns. So, investors aren’t left with many options to build a healthy diversified investment portfolio. New age investment platform Grip Invest is providing investors with an opportunity to diversify their portfolio by allowing them to access high-yield, fixed income products like lease financing or inventory financing.
In an e-mail interaction with FE Online, Nikhil Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, Grip Invest shares details about the investment platform and the associated risks. Excerpts:
What is Grip Invest and what it offers?
Grip Invest is a new-age investment platform that aims to act as a marketplace for a) investors looking to diversify their investment portfolio by investing in higher yield, asset-backed opportunities, and b) companies looking to leverage lease financing and access new forms of capital.
Grip Invest started operations amidst the pandemic in 2020 and offered lease financing as a product. We present an opportunity for investors to co-invest money in leasing assets – such as electric vehicles, furniture, EV batteries, cloud kitchen equipment, etc. – through our platform. This would further enable those companies to grow without raising equity or debt but using leasing as a form of growth capital. The investors on the other hand get fixed monthly returns.
Covid pandemic has forced companies to shutdown offices. Many companies are now planning to adopt a hybrid work model. Under these circumstances, what is the growth potential of funds invested through Grip Invest?
While Covid has thrown up many challenges it has also created many opportunities. With many companies looking at a hybrid model, co-working spaces have become more in demand. They allow companies to scale up and down seats as required. Co-working spaces are ideal candidates for deployment of funds invested through Grip as they work on asset-light models and a co-working space provider needs to quickly scale their presence.
Another example is last mile delivery – Covid has increased ecommerce as well as the hyperlocal delivery segment. This has resulted in an increased requirement for capex across the value chain – more warehouses, more third-party logistics fleet, more last mile delivery fleet etc. This has resulted in a huge opportunity for Grip.
Lastly, the growing adoption of EV has created a large deployment opportunity for Grip. In the next 10 years, new OEMs will need …….