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BIPIN BIHARI SINHA
Bipin Bihari Sinha, 50, is a financial solutions provider to over 6,500 clients – mostly defence personnel across India. Based in the ‘Blue City’ of Jodhpur, Mr. Sinha has over 27 years of experience in the financial world and manages nearly Rs 600 crore of investors’ assets. Founder and Chairman of SSS Distributors Private Ltd, Mr. Sinha has a strong belief that financial wellbeing is of utmost importance for all individuals. His remarkable and continuous passion for helping individuals reach their financial freedom while fulfilling their lives’ goals keeps him active and energetic.
A mining engineer, Mr. Sinha always dreamt to be an economist. But his father, an Air Force personnel wanted young Mr. Sinha to pursue engineering. After completing his engineering in 1994, Mr. Sinha joined Kolar Gold mines for few months. However, in the very next year, he had to donate one of his kidneys to his ailing father in an Army Hospital in New Delhi. It was there Mr. Sinha met his would-be wife, an Army Officer, and got married in 1996.
Mr. Sinha, having a sportsman spirit, had represented the state of Karnataka in badminton. Also good at table tennis, he was a cricketer during his college days. Originally from Vaishali district – the world’s first Republic in the state of Bihar; Mr. Sinha worked at various financial firms after leaving Kolar Mines. Always interested in economics, working with financial firms gave Mr. Sinha a fair amount of knowledge about financial products. It was in 1998, he started on his own and founded his company under the name Sinha Investments. In due course of time, the name change happened to Sinha Smart Soldiers Advisory Services and then to present-day SSS Distributors Private Ltd.
Why Defence Personnel?
His marriage with the Army officer introduced him to the Indian Army. With continuous close proximity to the defence personnel, Mr. Sinha realised that financial literacy among the officers and staff was not up to the mark. Their awareness of financial tools and the effectiveness of financial planning was far below than that of the outside world. Further, he discovered that a lot of mis-selling was taking place with a massive tilt towards insurance products – a high revenue generating product for agents.
After digging a bit more, Mr. Sinha understood that it was not so that defence officials were not educated. Rather, their isolation from the masses forced them to be limited with theoretical knowledge and thus they lagged behind in terms of practical knowledge. He could foresee the necessity of educating them about how to go about financial planning. It was there and then that Mr. Sinha decided to work for the Defence personnel and devoted his life to offer financial solutions to them. He took his first lecture in 2001 while addressing personnel of the Army’s 39 Mountain Division at Reasi in Jammu & Kashmir. It was his first mass-scale interaction with Army officers. Since then, there has been no looking back for Mr. Sinha. He keeps visiting various cantonments across the country to create financial awareness.
Dealing with individuals’ investment needs
Out of SSS Distributors’ 6,500 investors’ base, nearly 1500 have already achieved financial freedom. While meeting clients to distribute financial products, Mr. Sinha goes deeper into clients’ entire family history, tries to better understand the income, assets and liabilities along with knowing what their financial goals are. This helps him explain suitable financial products available for individual clients. A firm believer in asset allocation – the most important basics of investment at any point in time, Mr. Sinha considers his foremost duty is to restore and maintain a proper balance between debt
and equity assets in clients’ portfolios. He spends time with investors and tries to understand their needs and liabilities before offering investment products. While ensuring this, he takes care of maintaining adequate liquidity in the portfolio which his investors can bank upon in times of emergency. Debt allocation is largely taken care of by the DSOPF/PF and for the equity part, Mr. Sinha fully depends on the growth-oriented equity mutual funds. Apart from mutual funds, SSS Distributors Private Ltd also offers services that include vehicle insurance, term insurance and medical insurance. Since Mr. Sinha understands the Defence Set up well, he even helps his clients settle various financial claims by offering a One-Stop solution through his company.
Servicing Clients
Believing in long-term relationship building, handholding of investors is among the top priorities for the Chairman of SSS Distributors Private Ltd in the financial distribution business. Sticking to the Client First approach, he has well-trained his 20-member team to take care of investors’ benefits first. Guidance is an investor’s perpetual need during the entire journey of wealth creation and Mr. Sinha always endeavours to live with the investors throughout their investment journey. He understands that there can’t and should not be any shortcuts when it comes to servicing the clients. Continuous engagement with investors, keeping a tap on their portfolios and take corrective actions when circumstances demand is among the core of SSS Distributors’ client servicing work. Mr. Sinha believes in working for satisfaction for investors and that’s what makes him happy and keeps him enthusiastic.
Capitalising on Technology
The chairman of SSS Distributors believes in technology and treats it as an important pillar for growth. He does not hesitate to invest in IT infrastructure which Mr. Sinha considers an indispensable aspect of his company in order to service his clients with ease resulting in a better experience for investors. As the number of clients grows, technology comes in handy when it comes to onboard the clients and service them in the long run. His firm is completely digitalised and there is absolutely no paperwork. The entire investment platform is completely online. It not only increases the efficiency but keeps Mr. Sinha and his team relevant in rapidly changing times.
His firm has its own full-fledged website — www.mutualfundsinha.com, where investors can learn a lot about basic concepts of investments and why should investments be given a priority for a better future. To aid investors better, there is a mobile application available too on the IOS as well as Android platform. He runs a YouTube channel as well which focuses more on educating investors about technical and fundamental parts of investments. Going forward, Mr. Sinha is all set to expand more on the company’s IT infrastructure. Within a year, SSS Distributors Private Ltd will be opening a call centre for the backend services to assist investors. The visionary chairman has foreseen the need for such a backup given the pace of growth. It is expected that in the next two years, SSS Distributors Private Ltd will be catering to 15000-20000 investors. And to have a smooth sailing experience for investors, an IT enabled call centre is a need of the hour which will prove highly beneficial.
Fully understanding the pressing need of the clients to have a permanent face to look up to during the course of the investment horizon, Mr. Sinha acknowledges the fact that investors tend to get uncomfortable when they have to deal with several changing faces for their investments. In fact, investors desire to have the luxury of a strong hand-holding by a professional who understands them fully and have all the required details. With financial firms, they never get this comfort as employees keep changing and building the same rapport with a new face may not be an easy task for many. It is here that SSS Distributors Private Ltd fills the gap well as it keeps the profile of investors and maintains the records. Mr. Sinha believes in long-term relations and presents himself and his company as someone investors can always look up to. He feels that
investors tend to lose connection when they are forced to tell their stories to new distributors every year regarding investments. At SSS Distributors Private Ltd, investors enjoy the comfort that they are dealing with a permanent face who knows their background well and understands their financial goals and other requirements.
Mr. Sinha has made sure that his team is available to the clients at any given hour of the day. He does not take his work as a profession with a timing of 9 to 5 as is the case with financial firms. In fact, it is a 24*7 service — seven days a week. Further, in long-term relationship building there can’t be any room for mis-selling of products to investors at SSS Distributors Private Ltd. At times, Mr. Sinha and his team feel that a particular fund is not performing and has problems, they take an exit call that is not investor-specific. If his team comes to the conclusion that a fund needs to be exited from, this is applied to all the investors. Coming to SSS Distributors Private Ltd essentially means an investor is getting the benefits of Mr. Sinha’s 25 years of experience in the financial sector. Undoubtedly, it is a great advantage as here investors are dealing with an experienced and passionate team and not a naive distributor who may be prone to faults inducing irreparable damage to investors’ wealth creation journey. Further, since Mr. Sinha has the know-how of the Defence setup, he has also developed the expertise of getting various claims settled in the past decades. These claims were raised by dependents of servicemen who met casualties during Mr. Sinha’s journey of over two decades. These ranged from a settlement with the Army, insurance and banking needs, among others.
The chairman of SSS Distributors’ Private Ltd firmly believes that investors should mature along with the course of the wealth creation journey. And this is possible only when investors are regularly educated and updated about the nuances of the market and how an investment works. In order to ensure his investors are properly informed, Mr. Sinha and his team use social media platforms for continuous education of investors. Be it through WhatsApp messages or YouTube videos. To aid that, Mr. Sinha conducts several sessions of awareness programmes for his clientele and prospective clients. He conducts lectures for defence personnel, war widows and other affected families and women whose husbands expired during the service with an endeavour to help them manage their money and generate a passive income through investments.
At SSS Distributors Private Ltd, making investors informed is taken very seriously as this helps prevent clients panic at certain phases of the market cycle. Mr. Sinha knows that an uninformed investor tends to redeem when he needs to be invested. The team at SSS Distributors Private Ltd helps them to be future-ready and mentally prepared for any shocks generating out of the market cycle in the next 2-3 years. Mr. Sinha acknowledges the fact that informed investors turn out to be successful wealth creators in the long run and thus considers educating clients as one of his top duties.
Mr. Sinha, with his sportsman spirit, is an enthusiast. His mission is to help everybody attain financial freedom. For the same, financial literacy is important for which he has devoted his life. According to him, people work hard throughout their lifetime to earn money, it is his job to make people learn how to make their money work harder for them. Working on his mission for the last two-and-a-half decades, Mr. Sinha has the vision to reach the maximum number of people with this thought process and help them become financially independent. With his belief that interacting with people is the best way to have an overall growth through processes, he continues to remain passionate and devoted to his work. He does not consider himself as a salesman but someone who shares and learns from other experiences while caring for his investors. The same processes he has successfully inculcated in SSS Distributors Private Ltd and wants the legacy to be maintained for ages even when he is not there. “I have set up an institution with processes and its journey will not stop whether I am there or not. I always endeavour to replicate myself to such great numbers that one day my vision would be successfully met. I may not be there to rejoice that moment but the journey should never stop,” Mr. Sinha says proudly.
During the past 25 years of his journey in the financial sector, Sinha built two great assets, his two sons — Rahul and Rohit. Both in their early 20s, they have joined SSS Distributors Private Ltd. Having an engineering background, both have developed analytical mindsets which are likely to prove beneficial for propelling Mr. Sinha’s vision of financial freedom further. With high conviction, Mr. Sinha has always believed in specialisation while keeping things simple. Both of his sons are pursuing Certified Financial Planner (CFP) courses and will emerge as strong pillars for the company. Mr. Sinha strongly believes and places his trust in his sons that they will help carry his legacy further and attain newer heights while keeping his Mission and Vision intact.