Shoonya by Finvasia appoints Basant Dhawan as CMO

Shoonya by Finvasia today announced the appointment of Basant Dhawan as its Chief Marketing Officer. Basant will lead Shoonya’s brand, digital marketing and customer growth as the platform works to reach a much wider base of investors across India.

Basant has close to 30 years of experience across BFSI, news, sports broadcasting, OTT and telecommunications. Much of his career has been in businesses where consumers were moving from traditional media to digital and mobile, and his work has moved with them.

Most recently, he was Chief Operating Officer at Polymaxx Adhesives. Before that, as Group Chief Marketing Officer at Capri Global Capital (Capri Loans), he was responsible for brand marketing, strategic communications, digital and social media across the group’s lending and sports businesses. He led Capri Loans campaign with Pankaj Tripathi for its MSME and gold loan products, which ran across online & offline channels. During IPL , he also led a series of digital-first brand films featuring Gujarat Titans captain Shubman Gill.

Before Capri, at Network18, he was CEO of English and Business News, leading CNN-News18, CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz and CNBC Bazaar. At Disney Star, as Senior Vice President and Head of Emerging Sports, he was part of the team that launched and built the sports leagues - Pro Kabaddi League, the Indian Super League and the Premier Badminton League, bringing in audiences for sports beyond cricket on TV and streaming.

At Vodafone India, he was General Manager, Media and Digital, and managed the brand’s IPL sponsorship, including the ZooZoo campaigns and the Vodafone Superfan activation.

That experience lines up closely with where Shoonya is headed next. Most of Shoonya’s growth so far has come from active traders who found the platform on their own. The next group of users is much larger: first-time investors who will discover Shoonya on their phones, through social media, video and sport. Basant has built trust in financial products through digital campaigns and has grown new audiences for sports and news at national scale. He will now bring that to Shoonya and to its newer initiatives, including Upside, Shoonya’s market education platform.

Basant has a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication from Manipal Institute of Technology and is an alumnus of IIM Calcutta.

Sarvjeet Singh Virk, Co-founder and Managing Director, Finvasia Group, said, “Shoonya has grown mostly by word of mouth among active traders. The next stage is reaching people who are opening their first demat account, and most of them will find us on a phone screen on any of the digital channels,. Basant has done this kind of work. He built a lending brand across geographies, helped launch new sports leagues from scratch, and ran some of the country’s best-known business news channels. Very few marketers have done all of that across finance, media and digital, and that’s the experience we need to make Shoonya a name first-time investors recognise and trust.”

Basant Dhawan, Chief Marketing Officer, Shoonya by Finvasia, said, “In news, telecom and sports, I’ve seen audiences move to digital very quickly, and the brands that kept up were the ones that were useful to people on those platforms. Investing in India is going through the same shift. Shoonya is a great value platform that serious traders rely on, and with Upside, it’s investing in education. The  focus is to strengthen the proposition further for the evolved traders & create differentiated product offerings that appeal to the millions of Indians who are starting to invest. It's about giving  them reasons to trust Shoonya from their first trade.”