Dvara SmartGold spreads financial safety net across India with flexible savings plans

Having a financial safety net is perhaps the only wish you’d want granted by a genie thrice, given the current vagaries of the pandemic. The multi-layered Indian society consists of people across all scales of finance, and those with low and lower-middle income are hit the hardest due to the pandemic. However, a spectrum of reasonable and trustworthy investment metrics by Dvara SmartGold has been helping these families have a better living condition since 2020.

Dvara SmartGold is a wing of the Dvara Group, and facilitates easy micro-savings schemes for families with the monthly income of Rs 10,000 – 30,000. “Many of these people are unaware of prevalent savings options such as mutual funds and wouldn’t be able to follow the procedures successfully. Many of them even live far away from banks, which makes banking difficult. Dvara SmartGold has been sending personnel who collect their savings from their doorsteps, thus making investment simpler,” said Dvara SmartGold director Sanjeev Agarwal.

Methodology and customer feedback

Gold as an asset class has been understood and trusted upon across the length and breadth of India. Investment is easy. One can start with a minimum weekly, fortnightly or monthly contribution of Rs 500. The company buys gold with the customer’s investment and assures loans, jewellery and cash in times of crises.  The company has been able to reach out to lakhs of customers since last year because of their partnerships with brands offering financial services. “Our partners have sales agents who collect investments from doorstep. We also have the entrepreneur programme by which we appoint sales people who get new customers for us. This strategy has helped us service our customers even during the pandemic, as they didn’t have to leave their homes,” opined Agarwal.

Thanks to the approach towards savings, the company has about 80% of its customers saving month-on-month. “In times when people are losing jobs, we still have such a good figure to thrive on. Besides, those discontinuing services for now have reached out to us, complementing our services and saying that they’ll resume saving once they start earning again,” said the director.

Easy loan and transparent measures

Investing for Dvara SmartGold has several benefits, one of which is the company’s tie-up with leading national jewellery brands. Once can approach a desirable brand and can convert the gold saved in the locker into jewellery. The group also facilitates short-term loans for the gold saved in lockers, as per RBI mandates. It only takes 2 hours for the brand to accept loan request and transfer the money to the beneficiary’s account, thus guaranteeing prompt help. “The ideology stems from the parent company of Dvara Group, formed 13 years back with help from ICICI Bank. The group has several sub-brands working to extend financial services to every Indian in India. Keeping that in mind, extremely high level of business ethics and transparency has helped us win over customers,” said Agarwal.

As for the processes, the company buys bullion from EPMA and BIS-certified bullion dealers and only those who supply gold bullion to the commodity exchange. The brand also has partnering banks undertake regular independent audits of their vaulting system to ensure that the amount of gold that the company is keeping on behalf of each customer is there inside the locker.

Milestones achieved

Within a year of operation, Dvara SmartGold has acquired thousands of customers across 4,500 towns and villages establishing the intrinsic consumer faith in gold to protect the financial health of the family.  Even during pandemic, the brand has a customer stickiness of 75% and is well on its way to branch out a strong financial safety net countrywide.

Written by Shubham Dasgupta