Sharan Hegde’s 1% Club gets SEBI’s ‘holy grail license’ to give financial advice

Sharan Hegde’s financial edtech platform, The 1% Club, has secured A Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) licence from SEBI.

Published on: Feb 6, 2025, 10:53:37 IST

By Sanya Jain

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Sharan Hegde’s financial edtech platform, The 1% Club, has secured A Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) licence from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). With this, The 1% Club has become one of the first finfluencer-led platforms to secure SEBI’s RIA license.

Sharan Hegde celebrates as 1% Club gets SEBI's RIA license. (Instagram/@financewithsharan)

In an Instagram post last night, Sharan Hegde explained that an RIA license will give him and his team the right to give investment advice and financial planning services to clients. He added that the startup is managing ₹750 Cr in assets under advisory (AUA).

“It’s official!! We got SEBI-registered as a RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) last year, the holy grail license to give financial advice allowing us to currently manage ₹750 Crore+ in assets under Advisory,” Hegde wrote in his Instagram post.

Time to walk the talk

Sharan Hegde has been creating content and selling courses around financial planning for the last four years. He acknowledged that with SEBI’s nod, it is time for him to “walk the talk”.

“I started this journey 4 years back by first creating content on financial planning. Two years later I started teaching financial planning through live sessions and taught over 5 lakh students. Now it’s time to finally walk the talk and actually manage public’s money with a team of 45+ people,” he wrote.

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A post shared by Sharan Hegde (@financewithsharan)

The finance influencer also highlighted the huge gap in the market when it comes to RIAs.

“The SEBI chairman recently stated that India needs 1 million RIAs to bridge the financial gap. Currently we have only 1,300,” he wrote, equating that to having only one doctor for 10 lakh people.

“This significant gap shows the urgent need for more qualified financial advisors to serve our diverse population. To have only 1,300 doctors in India would be a national crisis and yet when it comes to financial advice which directly impacts the hard earned money saved by people, their investments and future, we are completely unprepared,” he wrote.

According to Inc42, Hegde’s startup is now eyeing expansions into several Indian cities, with a long-term vision to get more SEBI licenses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sanya Jain
Sanya Jain is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Digital. She has nearly a decade of experience in covering offbeat stories that speak to the everyday experience - from viral videos to human interest copies that spark conversation. Her interests stretch across business, pop culture, social media trends, entertainment and global affairs. Before joining Hindustan Times, Sanya spent two years with Moneycontrol and five years with NDTV. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and a master’s in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. Sanya has a sharp eye for spotting emerging trends and looking for newsworthy angles to elevate viral posts into meaningful narratives. She was the first one, for example, to cover Narayana Murthy’s remark on 70-hour work weeks that sparked a national conversation. She is equally at ease writing about business leaders as about the common man, about issues of national importance and memes that amuse social media. Sanya enjoys speaking with content creators, newsmakers and entrepreneurs to transform everyday moments into engaging, slice-of-life stories that resonate with readers. When she is not working, Sanya can be found curled up with a good book. Born and raised in Lucknow, she has spent the last several years in Delhi. She is deeply interested in animal welfare and now spends a lot of her time running after her destructive orange cat.Read More

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