Personal finance is how a person manages their own money: saving, investing, borrowing, paying tax and planning for retirement. In India, most of this now happens on a phone. Ten years ago, buying shares meant filling in forms at a broker's office. Today, tens of millions of Indians have opened investment accounts on their phones, each in a few minutes.
Here is a typical case. A nurse in Kochi earns ₹60,000 a month. She opens an account on a stock trading app. The app checks her identity with her PAN card and Aadhaar. This identity check is called KYC, or know your customer. Every month, she puts ₹5,000 into an index fund, a fund that simply buys the shares of India's fifty largest companies. She pays for it from her bank account with UPI.
She also saves small amounts. Another app debits ₹20 a day from her bank account and buys digital gold with it. This is real gold, stored in a vault in her name. She keeps her emergency money in a fixed deposit. She chose the bank on a fixed deposit and bond platform, which shows the interest rates of many banks side by side.
Next, she checks her credit score. This is a number from 300 to 900 that tells lenders how reliably she has repaid loans in the past. A credit score monitoring app shows it to her for free. Last year, she owed money on two credit cards at a high rate of interest. A debt consolidation loan replaced both debts with one cheaper loan.
In July, she files her income tax return with income tax filing software. The software reads the salary details that her employer sends, and fills in the form for her. Finally, she thinks about retirement. Like many salaried Indians, she already saves in her provident fund. Abroad, many workers also use a robo-advisor for retirement, software that chooses and manages their retirement investments automatically.
The same phone also offers riskier products. Some traders bet on price movements with futures and options (F&O). Outside India, traders also use a CFD trading platform for the same kind of bet. Wealthier investors can put money into a start-up through an angel investing syndicate.
One rule shapes all of these apps. In India, only an adviser registered with SEBI, the market regulator, may tell a person which investment to buy. An app may explain products and compare them, but it must not give advice. This line is explained in investment advice regulation.