Issue #6 - A week in Fintech (05/08)
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Issue #6 - A week in Fintech (05/08)
Running Commentary on Fintech as it happened!
Good Morning,
Last week, I did a workshop on the Product Launch & Go-To-Market framework in collaboration with Product Tank Pune and released a framework that can be used for your product launches. The link is available here. It also got featured on Lenny Ratchitsky’s newsletter, a well-known product evangelist.
I mentioned that I will be releasing a magazine soon which is currently under design review, I shall be releasing a preview on the Whatsapp Group. Hoping to receive feedback from you guys
With respect to issuing two newsletters a week, I think I am getting ready with the format. It is going to be about two things
A breakdown of a company's history, products, and their growth
A framework of how the fintech is stacking up in the ecosystem
Also, realized the WhatsApp group isn't active, so I am working on a concept called Fintech Bytes, which will be nothing but short bytes of articles that will be published in WhatsApp every day as an issue.
Moving on to last week’s updates!
🤓 Events
iSpirt held the second Open House Discussion on OCEN last Friday, where they walked us through various possibilities of using the OCEN framework for different use cases. I have attached their youtube link below
Video #1 where they introduced the concept of OCEN
Video #2 where they dived into the model of OCEN
Why is this important?
OCEN's (Open Credit Enablement Network) objective is to standardize the onboarding for the LSPs Loan Service Providers) or originators. The OCEN has already tied up with multiple lending partners at its backend, who will take the responsibility of conducting the risk assessment of the customers while the LSPs will take care of the origination of customers, creating new product offerings for the customers and think about cross-selling other products to them.
📣Open Role Spotlight
Karza Technologies are looking out for a Python Developer for Web Scraping capability
Payu India is looking out for someone to lead the large enterprise integration. Minimum experience is 18 years with Cloud/SAAS integration background
OkCredit has an opening in Partnerships & Strategic Alliance team, this is largely sales role for partnering with various financial stakeholders for growing their business
Slice requires a strong candidate in Marketing specializing in Digital to grow their customer base
Mobikwik has 2 senior openings, leading the Risk Team for Unsecured Consumer Financing which will require the knowledge of various unsecured financial products and AVP for Legal & Contract team
🏦Credit Cards & Banking
🚀Product Launches
Axis Bank launched a multi-lingual voice-assisted BOT for customer servicing
Axis Bank 'Dil Se Open' campaign which seems like a campaign directed for the masses has led to a bunch of technology initiatives at Axis Bank. They recently launched a voice-assisted BOT called AXAA for customer service in partnership with vernacular.ai under the same campaign banner.
How will this be different from your regular IVRs?
You don't need to key-in your request numbers anymore since it will be a voice-assisted agent
The voice-assisted agent will be available in three different languages English, Hindi and Hinglish which would cover 60% of the Indian population
If executed properly by integrating all the customer-related information to the chatbot, this should reduce the inbound on-field tele-calling team support by 40-50% since the voice-based BOTs have become fairly superior in the last couple of years.
You should visit http://vernacular.ai/ and see their demo on how it is being used for various use-cases outside Fintech as well.
💻Fintech
🚀Product Launches
Mobikwik launched mpay.me, a personal UPI payment gateway for the customers to enable other users to make payment from their favorite apps
This is largely for the small business owners, individual service providers who want to collect payment from the customers via QR Code or via payment link from an online medium. Mobikwik has built the capability to let the receivers (users or businesses who want to receive payment) collect payment from the senders (users or consumers who will send payments) from their list of UPI apps.
This is similar to what Instamojo, Razorpay provides on their platform, where businesses can generate a link and send it to the consumers to get payments (useful when you want to fix an amount to get from the consumer)
How is it any different from sending payment to someone by typing in their UPI handle or finding them on Google Pay mobile number?
These are largely going to be used for a consumer to business transactions which means these businesses won't be in your contact book to pop-out as a phone number to make a transfer
UPI handles are susceptible to erroneous entries. Imagine, listing my UPI handle 220302@axis.bank and you end up typing 220202@axis.bank while making a transfer.
The payment link standardizes the mechanism to collect payment from consumers and it also gives flexibility to the consumers to select the app they are most comfortable making the payment from (in this case, only UPI apps)
Will this be used for P2P transactions? I have my doubts because P2P is driven by typing in the phone number and making a transfer and requires a behavior shift and there is a problem of trust of sharing your QR codes
Wibmo launched Video Based Customer KYC
Wibmo which is part of PayU's ecosystem has launched a Video-Based Customer Identification utility for Banks for onboarding New to Bank/NBFC customers. This will be (i guess) Wibmo's first product launch into the verification space.
After RBI's amendment for using Video-KYC in June, Service providers like Video KYC in the onboarding and verification space have launched the Video-KYC product for banks and NBFCs
PaisaBazaar launched "Digital Lending Stack"
PaisaBazaar has launched a Digital Lending stack to assist lenders to onboard customers digitally. The stack covers 4 major stages of customer's onboarding lifecycle
KYC Verification
Income & Employment Assessment
Repayment Setup
Digital Agreement Signing
PaisaBazaar would have partnered with various fintech partners who specialize and provide services in each of the above categories to launch this for the Banks and NBFCs to ease the mechanism to onboard customers.
They have already gone live with IndusInd bank for selling Credit Cards.
This is the basic framework, however, there are a lot of moving parts in lending that needs to be configured in partnership with lenders basis their risk assessment and onboarding strategy.’
Truecaller has started offering Personal Loans on their platform in partnership with MoneyView
Yes, you heard it right, the app that helps you identify mysterious callers has extended into offering financial services. This should not be news to you if you have been following the fintech space closely, Truecaller introduced payments service back in 2018 for its users to increase it's ARPU and increase stickiness on their platform. With a base of 150 million monthly active users, I am sure they have the calling data on almost 90% of the Indian population.
Their only monetization until 2018 was providing Premium Caller Identification services to the users and like every other platform providing advertising services to the businesses to make targeted calls to the customers.
Moneyview is their lending partner as per their terms and conditions who will be taking care of risk assessment, underwriting, and collecting your payments.
PayU rolls out Autopay feature for subscription payments for their merchant partners
NPCI recently launched the UPI Autopay feature on its platform which helps businesses collect recurring payment from their customers.
Amounts that will be lesser than Rs.2000/- will be on auto-debit
Amounts greater than Rs.2000/- will require PIN consent for every transaction
The recurring payment can be set-up for any type of frequency which creates multiple use-cases across various industries, prominent examples being
Utility bills
Collecting EMI Payments
Recurring Subscription services like entertainment, OTT, lifestyle services
PayU has integrated the NPCI's UPI AutoPay into their list of payment options for the current businesses
Two things will end up happening here
Merchants who were dependent on reminding customers every month to keep their subscription active can switch the customers into recurring members (it's like switching a huge prepaid segment to postpaid)
New EMI products will be introduced for customers where instead of having customers register for the mandate, you can switch the customers to register for UPI AutoPay with higher frequencies
💪Partnerships
Craft Silicon & PayU have announced a partnership to offer Loan Repayment Solutions to all of Craft Silicon's current and new clients
Craft Silicon , A SAAS provider for Banks and NBFCs has partnered with PayU to introduce the capability for collect EMI payments from customers which means all the Banks and NBFCs who are using Craft Silicon software will be loaded into the BBPS infrastructure. The Banks and NBFCs will be live on both online (Gpay, PhonePe, Paytm etc) and offline mediums which constitute 4.2 million collection touchpoints across PAN India.
I am guessing when they say a strategic association, it would mean it's an exclusive partnership with PayU and Craft Silicon where CraftSilicon will offer PayU payment solutions as an exclusive packaged partner for their overall solutions
🔑Mergers & Acquisitions
Niyo Solutions, a neo-bank startup acquires GoalWise Mutual Funds
This adds one more service for the existing customers along with a Savings Account which returns 7% ROI, 0% Forex mark-up, and 0% commission fee on their platform. Neo-Bank unlike traditional banks works along with a partnership with the existing banks to acquire customers and offer innovative products to retain them.
Last week, I mentioned how FamPay launched their numberless card to attract a teenage population to open up an account with them
A couple of weeks ago, I got a credit card from a startup called OneScore which is fencing in the same domain.
These are various acquisition strategies that have been adopted by the startups
FamPay issues Numberless Debit Card (for parents with teenagers because of security)
Niyo Solution offers a savings account with a 7% interest rate (thinking of making a switch?)
OneScore launches "Metal" credit card called OneCard for its user base (because it’s Metal, and has a style statement attached to it)
The idea is to excite the customer to use their products and then cross-sell, up-sell them other products over a period of time.
KKR to invest into InCred Finance and merge & Incred raises 500 cr from public markets
KKR India Financial Services Limited and InCred Finance are merging and will be operating under the Incred Finance brand name.
This will bring their AUM to almost Rs. 6000 Cr which will put them under the top 50 NBFCs in India by Book size.
InCred recently raised 500 cr debt from PSU and lenders to scale their operations
InCred also acquired a fintech company Qbera a couple of months ago.
JODO, which has started out with paying your child's school fee has raised 28.5Cr funding from Matrix Partners and SAIF Partners
Jodo's objective is to re-design the financial products for India largely catering to the middle-class Indians. The first product that they launched is the capability to pay your child's school fee over monthly payments rather than paying in full.
Everyone understands this, parents want to send their children to a private school which provides a great education for their kids however, they would not have the money to pay for it. But what segment would this constitute of? My guess is
These are the same parents who are used to borrowing consumer finance loans for essential goods,
Renting out furniture from Furlenco, RentoMojo
There is already a behavior that is being tapped into where Jodo would get their first batch of customers.
This is similar to a company called BrainyBatch where they are tapping into partnerships with lenders to provide loans to the parents for pay for their children's fees.
Downside? Perhaps not paying could potentially lead to your kid being expelled from the school and I am guessing no parent would want that.
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Disclaimer: The newsletter contains information about Fintech and Organizations that operate in or around the fintech industry. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing paragraph, we do not represent, warrant, undertake, or guarantee ... that the information in the newsletter is correct, accurate, complete, or non-misleading. We will not be liable to you in respect of any special, indirect, or consequential loss or damage. If a section of this disclaimer is determined by any court or other competent authority to be unlawful and/or unenforceable, the other sections of this disclaimer continue in effect.