CEO Insights Magazine

A NITT alumnus and a Certified Financial Planner, Bhuvanaa Shreeram, Co-Founder, House of Alpha has over 17 years of experience in financial services working with the TATA Group, Sundaram Finance, and Wealth Advisors India. Her inspiration to take a plunge into financial services was primarily the need to fix her own financial life. The absence of Financial Advisors during the early 2000s made her pursue a Financial Planning course and gain significant knowledge about the sector. Soon she started offering services to her friends and people she knew, who had the same problems as herself. The small initiative to help friends and family create a financially secure future turned into a passion and profession.

After working for eight years in various Wealth Management companies, she started her independent practice and established Plan2Prosper. Her recent venture House of Alpha was founded along with like minded professionals with whom she shares a strong value system and intent to add real value at reasonable cost. Bhuvanaa is a great Life Planner, Financial Planner, and Investment Advisor who is also actively associated with volunteering work where she helps as a scribe enabling children with learning disabilities to write exams. Let’s hear it from her as she talks about her journey and more.

How would you define House of Alpha as an organization and its current position in the market?
House of Alpha is a one year old organisation built by a team of highly qualified professionals with

collective experience of over 80 years. At present, we are focusing on building our team and an intuitive technology platform and also on onboarding good clients. Our services are customised but we hope to be able to do it in scale using smart technology. We are in an industry that is largely promoter driven and promoter dependent. Advisers manage 80-100 clients and doing it on a large scale is still a challenge. This is the gap that we are aiming to bridge at House of Alpha by creating a high tech hightouch compelling experience for many.

What are the fundamental factors you consider while suggesting wealth management plans to your customers?
At House of Alpha every plan is personalised. To us the client and their family is the client. The money is only incidental and a tool. The focus is on the lives, aspirations, objectives and dreams that clients have for themselves and their families.

I believe the right way to do wealth management is to base it on a sound financial plan. So, every client goes through the process of financial planning. And their investment plan is the outcome of a sound financial plan that our clients co-create along with our help.

Reflect on some of the toughest challenges you have encountered in your journey so far. What did you learn from them?
When I began my journey, I was in Tata Motors engaged in heavy commercial vehicle sales. I was

probably the only woman selling commercial vehicles in the country back then. This made me travel a lot, meet and interact with people from different back grounds and create trusting relationships. Although it was a challenging job it gave me a solid grounding and helped me understand the benefits of staying close to the market and the customer’s lives. It was a great opportunity for me to get out of my comfort zone and do something very different. From there I moved to Wealth Management which was a completely new industry for me. I had to start all over again, and just when I was learning the ropes, markets crashed in 2008. For every financial advisor 2008 has been an experience that they would never forget. But this again shaped my understanding of how people & markets respond and made me understand that to survive in this industry keeping calm and staying patient is very crucial.These learnings eventually helped me in my entrepreneurial journey as well.

What are the future market opportunities that you look forward to investing your time to reach your goals?
The market is very nascent in India for fee-based advisory. There is abundant scope as there are not enough good service providers. So, we are excited to be in this fee-only financial advisory space. I am personally focused on upskilling myself to offer more personalised and intuitive services that would help clients go through life transitions and challenging situations smoothly and confidently.I hope to be of more value to my clients and I constantly work on improving client experiences and results. I am excited about the prospects of wealth management and I believe it is going to be the next big thing for India in the coming 25 years.

Bhuvanaa Shreeram, Co-Founder, House of Alpha
Bhuvanaa is a Certified Financial Planner and holds an MBA degree in Finance. She has 17+ years of experience in advising successful corporate executives and SME business owners to live a financially secured life.