Financial Services
Banking on Youth
16 Jul 2021
As restaurant aggregator and food delivery platform Zomato’s much-awaited Rs 9,375-crore initial public offering (IPO) opened a mere 12 years after the company was founded, among those lining up to bid for its shares were India’s youngest investors. While many stock market advisors were cautiously positive about the IPO for retail investment, it was but natural for a generation caught up in the intoxicating acquisitive chaos of the post-Covid Sensex bull run to look to an app they identify with to satiate their hunger for quick returns. It is not just Zomato or other tech startups poised to enter the public markets that are driving the buzz around IPOs and stocks in general.
Generation Z or zoomers, the generation born after 1995, is bound by common experiences that transcend their individual identity. The haze of the pandemic is one, and the precarity of the economy another. For a variety of reasons, this generation of under 26-year-olds has started to dabble in stocks, mutual funds, cryptocurrency and other financial assets sooner than the millennial cohort did.
Gold, fixed deposits and real estate are passé; even the aspirational values of millennials don’t seem to apply to zoomers who look at a car and a house as simply things to rent, but does that mean they are in a state of perpetual whimsy? Or is this estimated 375 million-strong segment of India’s population, with equal measures of vulnerability and swagger, truly witnessing a tech-led personal finance zeitgeist?