This Week in Fintech India (7/6)
This Week in Fintech India (7/6)
Bringing news to you so that you don't have to!
Hello Fintech Friends,
This is an update from the last week as it happened.
Quote of the week
Payment and lending startups have said that around 1,100 jobs will be opening up over the next year in product, design, engineering, business development, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. - There is light at the end of the tunnel
Open Role Spotlight
PayU has opened up two positions in the last 2 weeks
Product manager which would be based of Gurgaon
Director of products which is flexible for Gurgaon/Bangalore
PhonePe
Is looking to capitalize the current startup crunch and is expanding their team by 500 employees on its already 1800
It has multiple positions opened up across departments. Not sure where they have listed them since there is no source to validate it
Reads of the Week
Banking and Credit Cards
Product Launches
Mastercard, Axis Bank, and Worldline launch have launched Soft POS (or Software Point-of-Sale )which converts a smartphone into a POS machine for merchants who have been accepting cash payments traditionally.
The experience would be something like this
Features like QR code payments, NFC payments, and link generated payments will be provided
A khatabook kind of experience which will have a host of capabilities like inventory managements and transaction management
Axis Bank seems to have dived into this to become the first to market seeing that there will be a massive opportunity to bring some of the merchants onboarded digitally
Acquire new to Axis Bank liability customers who have largely been operating their business in the cash market with average ticket size equivalent to less than Rs.2000
Use this base to expand their business loan portfolio because all of these transactions B2B and B2C that will get generated via the POS will get recorded into the system will be utilized for underwriting
These features sets need to be extremely coherent, seamless and intuitive to address the market that they are talking about, I mean there have been startups who have been working towards making this possible
Advantages for the bank
Reduce the Capex Cost for Banks for sending the terminals to the shops and establishments
Expansion of liability base for New to Bank
Expansion of asset (loan book) to these customers with better offers because of the availability of rich transactional and ledger data
Hopefully, reduce friction with the merchants since there is no asset to protect
Advantages for Establishments
Reduce the cost of operations for establishment since they no longer have to pay rentals on the POS
Help establishments digitize their operations like inventory management, recording ledgers and digitize payments
Will help an establishment to get better loan offers from the bank and FIs
What has not been explained is that will this POS be utilized only if transaction sizes are lower than Rs.2000? Does the ledger software come within the software or will you have to download an app for that? And how does one record cash transactions in the app?
Hoping that we would soon see a detailed brochure mentioning that.
Fintech
Community Service
Happy to see fintech’s are working towards generating true value in the ecosystem
Funding News
BankBazaar secured INR 45 Cr as part of its series D1 which will be utilized to build contactless personal finance products and business expansion in India.
WSV has quoted them as becoming the "Credit Karma" of India.BankBazaar claims to get around 100 million visits per quarter which is huge in terms of traffic volume on their website, however, their aim to hit profitability this year will probably not see the light of the day this year because of CoVid hitting the retail banking really hard.
They did have plans of going IPO by the end of this year.
Partnerships
Razorpay recently partnered with Facebook to facilitate the capability to donate from their platform This is a big deal-win for Razorpay to tap into Facebook's big customer base.
Not surprising to see that Razorpay has not done a massive PR on this out yet since I believe this deal is slightly in a pilot mode and Facebook is merely testing out the integration of payments into their platform
And that’s all folks for the week.
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