Intuit forays into Indian market

MUMBAI, INDIA: Intuit Inc., a developer of business and personal finance management software solutions, today announced its entry into Indian market.

Intuit has established a Global Business Division for India and appointed Umang Bedi as managing director for India operations.

Bedi will be leading the marketing of the company’s products in India.

According to Brad Smith, Intuit president and CEO, the company’s focus is to improve the financial lives of people whether it is personal income tax planning or managing finances for small businesses.

“Intuit products will work on mobile platform and technologies, helping them socially and globally. Our approach to India is unique using our follow-me-home strategy that helps to understand the pain points and needs of individual customers and small businesses in managing finances,” Smith said while addressing the media here.

Smith pointed out that priority for the company include leveraging technology in two areas – financial management using mobile devices that helps people to save money as they don’t have, or use, computers and help small businesses in marketing and achieve growth.

The company plans to offer financial applications that can run on low-end mobiles, which can assist the needs of customers and small businesses that have under 10 staffs and don’t possess computer systems. It will offer solutions that are fully designed as per Indian market and local customer needs.

The solutions are expected to be out in the market by a couple of months from now. For the past four years, the company has expanded its research and development facility in Bangalore.

Presently, it has about 250 engineers and will increase the strength to 300 by this year end.

Within a couple of years, the company will raise its total strength to 600 in India. Already the company has invested about 45 million dollars for this current calendar year in India for business expansion.

Intuit said it holds strong position in the market in the US with 95 per cent market share in small business segment and about 78 per cent in personal income tax planning software segment.

Commenting on recession and shrinking of businesses, Smith said that there is a five-point strategy in this downturn – customer priority, delivery of profit goals, innovation and growth, invest in important market like India and Asia and make acquisitions.

According to Intuit India managing director Umang Bedi, the company will focus on small and micro business and individual customers.

“The solutions will work using simple mobile handsets and will try to get rid of the complex paper works and calculations,” said Bedi.

In the US, the company’s solutions works with all kind of mobile operating systems such Windows, Symbian and Macintosh.