LFP223 – Fintech in India with Naveen Bindal CEO of Enkash

London Fintech Podcast

Fintech is a Big Thing. India is a vast sub-continent. Naveen Bindal, the co–founder of Enkash which is India‘s largest spend management Fintech, joins us to discuss Fintech in India which was one of the first movers in Fintech worldwide and is now by some measures the world’s third largest Fintech marketplace.

Naveen started his career some 23 years ago as a developer in a credit card company working on payment processing and with banks.

Having been involved in the Indian FinTech space for some 10 years along with his co-founders who each also have two decades in FS and tech under their belts he is well-placed to guide us through its evolution past, present and future.

Topics discussed include:

• why India‘s timezone is 30 minutes out of phase with almost all other countries
• Naveen’s career journey
• the move from being a dev to being a CEO
• Naveen learnt how to be an entrepreneur by working with a startup within an existing organisation
• the principal FinTech hubs in India are Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore
• Mumbai is the banking hub of India due to the presence of the Reserve Bank of India, Bangalore is renowned for its tech talent and New Delhi is an extension of the other two hubs due to its status as the capital
• Fintechs may start in other cities but almost invariably end up gravitating to one of the big three cities
• The Indian fintech industry started to grow following the financial crisis of 2008 and the emergence of e–commerce
• Payment aggregators, P2P lending, payment gateways, digital marketplaces, prepaid cards, and UPI all emerged between 2010 and 2016
• IndiaStack has been hugely influential in Indian Fintech’s rapid development
• it was introduced in 2017-18 to facilitate digitisation and verify the identity of those making transactions
• Aadhaar was introduced, which provided a unique identifier for every individual, and biometric scans for fingerprint and retina scans were captured
• the pertinent/ironic etymology of chosing Aadhaar for the state’s identification system
• are privacy concerns an issue in India over a national identification scheme?
• in 2012, we saw the real growth actually happening where multiple payment instruments, quick checkout experiences sort of emerged, including but not limited to wallets, one-click checkouts, tokenization, and various other faster checkout mechanisms
• demographically about one billion people in India have access to smartphones with half a billion people living in rural areas
• around 70 million SMEs exist in India, and between 70–80 billion dollars of volume is processed on UPI each year
• given the size of the marketplace Indian Fintechs have little reason to expand internationally although different dynamics occur in the pure tech space
• Consumer payments have been the dominant sector of fintech in India, but insure tech and reg tech are also becoming increasingly prominent
• reg tech allows fintechs to access the data needed to verify businesses and individuals
• The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) provides the regulatory framework for fintechs to operate in conjunction with regulated entities
• embedded finance and open banking will be key areas of disruption in the future in India
• Enkassh provides a platform for CFOs to automate mundane tasks
• it has 150 employees and processes between $3.5–4 billion annually for 9000 businesses
• Enkash is looking for partnerships in other geographies to distribute some of their products

And much more

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