ICICI Direct Money Kitchen
ICICI bank is the leading private sector bank in India today, and it traces its routes to 1970s when it was a financial behemoth exclusively catering to very large Corporates and manufacturing organizations, under its old name which was Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India.
As India started liberalizing one sector after the other, which was started in full force from 1990, ICICI morphed itself into a banking organization catering to people from all walks of life. It started launching quite a lot of innovative financial products, and offered extremely customer friendly services. Indian public gravitated towards ICICI Bank like bees, since they were tired of dealing with the moribund public sector banks, which dealt with customers in a manner that made the people distinctly feel as if these banks are doing a favor on them. Indian populace found a very refreshing change with ICICI Bank and loved every bit of it.
Today ICICI Bank is offering hundreds of financial products and services, both to the common public, Small and Medium Enterprises, as well as to large Corporations.
The latest and a very welcome Initiative from ICICI Bank is a new type of service, which is named as ICICI Direct Money Kitchen. This was launched in October 2009. Let us see what ICICI Bank is offering under ICICI Direct Money Kitchen.
Services of ICICI Direct Money Kitchen
ICICI Direct Money Kitchen is a place in the neighborhood where families can spend quality time on creating their customized “Recipes for Wealth” for meeting their financial goals.
By providing a pleasant ambience and investor friendly experience, ICICIdirect Money Kitchen, is an innovative financial store where visitors can create their profiles to not only analyze their investment strategy by using various financial tools but also monitor it from time-to-time.
Sources from ICICIdirect informed that they have a customer base of over 19 Lac consumers. Through their customer feedback it was realised that though people are keen to invest and monitor their investments, they do not have the time or the space to do so at their home or workplace. ICICIdirect Money Kitchen provides a dedicated environment meant completely for managing one’s hard earned money. Individuals, irrespective of whether they are ICICIdirect customers or not, can access all the financial tools. For example Wealth GRIP (Goals, Retirement, Investment & Protection), a proprietary tool of ICICIdirect, will help customers in their financial planning to achieve their goals.
The unique part of this Money Kitchen is that you do not have to necessarily disclose your financial status with the relationship manager, but still assess the suitability of the Money Kitchen to your requirements, and if found fit, you can go ahead and avail of the range of services available in it.
Every month ICICIdirect generates financial plans in excess of 10,000 using WEALTH G.R.I.P. (Explained in the previous para).
At the ICICIdirect Money Kitchen, visitors can have free access to the various do-it-yourself tools and calculators to compute their investment strategies. The common public can avail of personalized guidance through trained staff, peruse a wide variety of reading material and information and even select various financial products which range from investment products like equity, mutual funds, fixed deposits, insurance, loans, credits cards etc.
Another unique feature of the Money Kitchen store is the “Kids Zone”, where children accompanying their parents can engage themselves in various activities, while their parents are busy planning their investment strategies.
This service was initially test launched in Ahmedabad and Pune. Based on the encouraging and positive feedback received by ICICI Direct, they have gone ahead and opened this specialty services stores namely ICICI Direct Money Kitchen, in various other cities of India.