Vladislav Kochetkov, President of FINAM Holding: “We are better at teaching than aggressively selling”

As Wikipedia politely informs us : FINAM Investment Holding JSC is the largest retail broker in Russia, as well as an investment group specializing in the provision of trading, investment banking services, trust management of cash and securities, and investment in the Forex currency market.

Most often, when we have a question in Habrahabr regarding finance in the digital world, we try to ask it to people who have undeniable experience and expertise in this field. And Vladislav Kochetkov, president of the aforementioned financial institution, just one of these people - this is not a secret.

Therefore, we decided without questions to ask Vladislav himself about how the company, in which he occupies not the last position, is oriented and operates in the modern dynamic world, where over the past 2015 its turnover amounted to $ 102 billion.

Vladislav, it is written on the Finam website that You have been working in the company since 2005. Have you been involved in the creation of this organization?

Not. FINAM - much older, it was founded in 1994 by Victor Remsha. He then just graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University. For the past 11 years I have been working in FINAM, but FINAM has become a market leader in the early 2000s. This was done before me.

It is clear that financial activity is a special market and an area of ​​application of one's own skills. What is the main lesson from the history of the company to its current moment of development?

Probably the main principle that FINAM follows from the very beginning is the generation of innovations. To stay in place, you need to move very fast. And to be a leader, you need to jump over the heads of competitors, creating new products. In its history, FINAM has created a lot of things that did not exist on the market before. And therefore, the company occupies a leading position.

The simplest example is the site finam.ru . It was created in 1999. The site was created not as a business card of brokers, but as an information site where all market participants could leave their comments. That is, we let even competitors go there. As a result, we have accumulated a large amount of analytics, we were able to cover almost the entire market and have expanded our audience many times.

Finam.ru is a leader in its segment. And for FINAM as a broker, bank, and management company, the site is the main generator of the client base. As a rule, the client first comes to the site for some information (currency quotes, stock quotes, comments), lives on it for a long time. According to our statistics, 8 months elapse from the moment of coming to the resource to the opening of the account. That is, he is interested, informed, and gradually becomes a client.

We don’t even have an active sales system on which many of our market colleagues live. Rather, we have passive sales with gradual involvement. We give an opportunity to become interested, and then a person comes to us. Moreover, all attempts to create active sales departments by analogy with competitors have failed. We are better at teaching than aggressively selling.

Training is the second innovation of FINAM. Now any brokerage company in Russia has a training center. The first training center appeared at FINAM. He appeared as a reaction to customer requests. A long time ago, most of the brokers in Moscow had offices on Myasnitskaya, in the building of the General Post Office, where the Russian Exchange was located. There was a large hall. Traders were sitting in this room. When they were trading, clients often approached and simply watched what the trader was doing behind his monitor: they asked to explain why this button was, why the other button ...

First there was one computer for which the client could sit. A consultant approached him and explained how to work. Then two computers appeared. Now about 150 thousand people go through our training center per year, and this indicator is growing. That is, we teach more than any financial university. Following us, training centers with a delay of 2 to 5 years appeared at other companies.

We were the first in Russia to introduce the comon.ru social trading service . Any user with a brokerage account can go to the site, look at the transactions and strategies of other traders and connect to them so that transactions are repeated automatically. This innovation is not even Russian, but global. Our direct competitor is the American site covestor.com- appeared around the same time.

Moreover, ideas arose independently of each other. Now social trading is already mainstream in the brokerage business.

We were the first in Russia to introduce the service of a personal financial consultant. If earlier a person had to either give money to management, or do everything on his own, then a personal assistant can just tell you, advise.
We were the first to launch a remote account opening, ahead of competitors by almost 8 months. Now we remotely open about 35% of accounts. We were the first to launch an online stock store and so on.

Can you name the main mistake and the most difficult task?

To be a leader, you need not to be in the market, but to create a market. Otherwise, at best you will be a strong middle peasant, and at worst an outsider.

The main mistake is the same for everyone: to continue unsuccessful projects. When you did something, invested a lot of energy, but the project didn’t shoot, and you continue to invest more energy and resources into it, this decomposes and demotivates the business. It not only eats up profits. People who see their colleagues sitting for years over a useless, useless project that they are sorry to close are also demotivated. Therefore, here it is necessary to cut without hesitation, without waiting until it becomes an ulcer on the body of the business. Healthy cruelty is very helpful.



What advice can you give to beginners, people following the same path? If a person wants to develop a career in finance, for example?

If you want, you have to go and do it. Finance is an area where you can quickly make an impressive career. I have a colleague who came to the company by courier, and now has become the head of a large department. He consciously chose the financial sector, although he did not have a completed education and was in his second year.

But, while still a student, he got a job in a financial company, talked with people, and understood the mechanisms of their work. This has become an excellent basis for further growth.

Therefore, there is no need to be afraid, sit, think, wait: “I’ll finish high school and go to work.” Even if you are a freshman, try to find a job. It’s better to start and learn practical knowledge right away than to find out later that you are a theoretician unnecessary in business. Because most of the people who come to us after universities have to retrain: spend at least six months so that the employee understands how the real business differs from the theory that he was told at the securities department.

You also make direct investments in online projects. What criteria can be considered the main one for those startups who would like to attract investment from FINAM?

We are now focusing on two areas. There is a FinSight Ventures fundwho invests in fintech projects. We are interested in the so-called "bank killers", peer to peer lending, acceleration and simplification of transactions. For example, from Russian companies in our portfolio, Platiza.ru is a microfinance organization that provides loans over the Internet. From Western companies - Lending Club, this is peer to peer loans. Earnest - Student Loan Financing. In general, everything that makes the financial sector cheaper, more convenient, faster, we are interested.

The second direction is the FINAM Global fund, where at the moment our old, well-functioning investments are in the companies Mamba, Badoo, E-generator. That is, here we are interested in both large traffic generators and audience content projects, which we can help monetize traffic with. We are also interested in advertising on the Internet.

Therefore, the criteria are as follows: getting into industry segmentation, the team and the audience of the project.

I understand correctly that today you can be called an international company, and not just a Russian one?

Yes, FINAM is a global company. Our divisions work not only in Russia (where we have 86 cities covered), but also in Europe, India, China, USA and Mexico. In these countries we have a physical presence. In general, we serve customers from more than 40 countries. Therefore, FINAM is a global financial company, and also a venture fund. Our portfolios include companies from India, Vietnam, China, Russia, Ukraine, the USA, France and other countries.

What is the next FINAM product that you have high hopes for?

It sounds a bit corny ... but we have an idea to launch a marketplace on finam.ru. He will sell not only financial services, but also a wider assortment - travel and much more. These are additional opportunities for our customers and additional opportunities for monetizing the audience. The audience of finam.ru is 10 times larger than the FINAM customer base, and we want to give them more than just information.