JULY - 20198MY STORYVenkat Rangan, CEO of Market Simplified is on to something really exciting. Those who know him well are probably thinking, when is he not. And they are right. As a champion of the culture of innovation in the organization he founded in 2005, it's in his genes to think on his feet, latch on to insights and create solutions that actually solve problems smartly. A trait that has defined him since the time he was a teenage entrepreneur, founding firms in Africa, Japan, North America and Europe, to solve real problems faced by his customers. "I was just 15 years old when I started my first firm - a multimedia venture", recalls Venkat. "We were doing computer and web-based training programs for banks. By the time I was 18 we were a full-blown company, completely into digitalization, and were talking about chatbots and NLP back then, in late 1990s and early 2000."After 9/11 Venkat and his team moved on to Singapore and started a new firm there. We were building a media convergence platform that worked on digital lines. The insight was based on the huge number of Indians living abroad who didn't have ready access to Indian content. Venkat sensed the opportunity and his firm designed an STB to help get that content to the consumers. Working out of Japan to make this happen, the start-up ensured that users could watch TV in DTH quality over internet ­ this was in early 2000s. It was innovations like this that finally paved the way for Venkat's most prolific enterprise ­ Market Simplified. In fact, one of his early successes was a mobile trading app for TD Ameritrade, on a pay for performance SaaS model, years before iPhone was launched. Doing something like this well before iPhone and Android were even heard of is quite something. And that is just of the many distinctions that propelled Venkat as a leader in the fintech world. "We were the first financial application in the world to go on the cloud", says Venkat, recalling his early days as an entrepreneur. "We were on Amazon cloud right from the time they were testing. We were the first mobile trading platform in Singapore and Malaysia, and the largest in Indonesia. And we continue to power the oldest brokerage in Singapore." Back in 2009, Venkat along with NSE, was instrumental in pushing the STWT Guidelines for Mobile Trading to SEBI. And then he also spotted a big opportunity in Amazon Web Services, insisting that unless they moved to AWS, he wouldn't launch OptionsExpress ­ a multi-tenant, multi-asset, multi-exchange trading app on cloud that would soon become another feather in his cap.With all the early success he had, the founding of Market Simplified was a natural step for Venkat. Back then, he and his team were investing in the stock market and travelling a lot as well. Which was a challenge because they couldn't track the market movement while on travel. One day when they landed in Singapore, flying in from Japan, they found themselves staring at a significant loss. That's when Venkat realized that something had to change."So, we created stop loss MLPs for all the technical indicators and they were all translated into simple, readable English," says Venkat, "We decided that this has to be available on mobile - that is the only way that a person can stay afloat in the market."The team went to work on the idea on the very same night that they landed in Singapore and by 9 am the next morning they had the white paper ready based on the idea of a server monitoring the portfolio. They decided to take the whitepaper along for an investor meet that morning. And by the afternoon, they were funded.The Habit of InnovationHow Insights, Intuition and Intent helped Venkat Rangan build a Fintech Powerhouse Venkat Rangan
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