Deputy CEO of bidnessetc.com and Qineqt, Mr Babar Din in talk with IDG Pakistan tells us about Qineqt which is the whole link company for their media flagship brand – bidnessetc.com. Din has worked previously with prestigious news organizations on global platforms. He is the co-founder of the company along with Nadir Khan, the CEO who made the initial investment of 300million dollar hedge fund in Pakistan.
He further adds that this company is going to disturb digital financial media as well as the wealth management space, a matter that was recently profiled by wall street journal as ‘much hit new thing on the plot’, which is their recent most achievement and a big deal for an organization getting international recognition. Their business model is basically a one-stop-shop for finance, a platform which is going to help from empowering investors to making decisions as well as any kind of retirement planning. The workforce went from just three people to eighty in a span of two years. The global indication partners of bidness etc are Google and Bloomberg Terminal along with other achievements that have been witnessed so far.
A massive deficit is going to be witnessed between the supply and demand of financial services as far as the free economical model works because the new generation is neither used to paying high fee nor consuming content and paying for it. So here is where bidness etc comes in by providing them with the content, financial services, wealth management, and financial advisory for free as well – a massive transition to take place. The traffic on their media product which is bidnessetc.com is mostly generated from the U.S and the rest is from Canada, England and few developed parts of Asia as well.
Din mentions they have serious plans to expand globally. Their coverage will expand by the mid of 2015 to many Asian and European markets, the key part being the production from Pakistan.
Their core team of analysts and editors are the cream of top notch universities in and out of Pakistan with their previous experience from leading news agencies, Dawn and Express Tribune.
Finance portrayed by bidness etc is rather attractive and colorful, as their website automatically grabs attention, enhancing user experience. Their verdict on this statement talked about the fact that there is a lot of drama in the financial world, investors going after companies, major fights all over the media, takeover attempts by individuals – it’s not just digits, charts and graph, the stories we share mention the humanistic element in the world of finance.
Bidness etc doesn’t run social campaigns, it is more of an ongoing process where the media team is taught to keep the reader hooked to the content that is being generated and keep entering conversations and engaging with the audience, pulling readers back to the content.
The biggest problem that is being faced currently is the sort of quality information that is only available to the hedge fund analyst, hedge fund professionals and high network professionals at the most is not made available to the public.
Lastly, Din spoke about the blooming of entrepreneurial culture in Pakistan and how everyone should be opting for e-retail. As far as being tech savvy is concerned, usage of cloud technologies is there along with the custom built technology EC2 which is supported by Amazon as for internal data sharing Microsoft products are used at bidness etc.
They look ahead in the future and are hoping to launch finance related mobile applications and games in the next few months, a personal finance portal within a year and most importantly the ‘business search engine’ which will be the perfect combination of Algorithms along with human input which will result in curated results and is the final goal. Furthermore, open to the idea of diversification where they could be having an online channel for instance, radio feed talk shows etc.
Summing it up Babar Din said, “We will be doubling our team as mentioned before, hiring the best of the best talent from within and outside of Pakistan making bidness etc the biggest financial media/ services company. This will be the first DIY (do it yourself) model in Pakistan as no one has done it before where financial services would be clicks away.”
