Indian digital payments firm discusses IPO plans

Supersana, great to see you again. Welcome and I guess congratulations. Have better timing this time around. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, for the IPO, Yes, absolutely. I think you know 21 was a different market. It was a amazing bull market and many Internet companies in India tried to list. But today Mobikwik is a much stronger company. We’ve grown our revenue three times since then and we have turned profitable at the pack level. So we have, you know, unlike many other fintechs who are still showing the path to profitability, we have actually turned profitable. So definitely a much stronger and better company with more diversified revenue lines. All right, But ₹7 billion? Sixty, 3% less than your first try back in 2021. What happened there? Well, like I said, I think at that time the market was very different, valuations were very different and the investment banks were definitely pushing an agenda to raise more and of course we wanted to grow more. Now in the last three years, as I told you, we have grown substantially and we have turned profitable. So we will also have sort of internal accruals of cash flow. So we don’t need as much capital. And you know, almost $100 million will be far sufficient for us sort of to scale the company another 3X4X. OK, Man’s coming on this. Yeah, absolutely. You were saying that you’ve been growing substantially and this is one of the problems, isn’t it, that quite often when you have a fast growing sector like fintech, the regulations just can’t keep up. So what do you think of the RBI’s draft guidelines for self regulation in the fintech industry essentially for you guys to innovate responsibly? Is it too, is it a bit too loosey goosey or do you think this is a good idea? No, no, I think its absolutely a good idea. In fact, you know, you know all through what has happened in economies all over the world last few years, we have seen the Indian central banks steps have been very prudent. So its a very balanced approach. They are very pro fintechs and pro innovation because they know that fintechs will bring the distribution that will take us to Tier 2, Tier 3I where most of Indians, most Indians have a bank account, have smartphones, but they are not well served on financial products. So I think that what they try to do, what RBI, the central bank tries to do is to publish sort of the main guidelines in consultation with the industry body and then for all the next level finer details. I think its a very proactive approach that they are asking you know the industry bodies itself to form a self regulatory organization and figure out the finer details, you know of the main guidelines they publish. I think that shows confidence in the ecosystem where they expect the fintech players to come together and self regulate. Indeed gives you a little bit more bandwidth for innovation. Talking of which, you recently unveiled Pocket UPI, which allows customers to be able to make payments without linking essentially their accounts to their bank account. What else have you got in the pipeline for innovation? So let me talk for a second about Pocket UPI and then I’ll tell you about one or two more interesting products that we’ve done. So Pocket UPI is like your small, you know, wallet account where you can park money and then you can use it for all your daily life transactions. You know, in India we scan a QR code on UPI network to pay you know for everything, whether it is for transit, whether it is for buying lunch, groceries etcetera. And previously people had to dip into their bank account for every such you know, $1.00, two dollar $5 transaction. And by with pocket UPI you know, you can, you know, keep your primary bank account safe and you can dip into your pocket UPI account, your wallet account to make all these payments. And it not only works, you know, it’s interoperable. So it works on all the merchants, almost 100 million merchants in India except UPI. And that’s sort of the power of pocket UPI. Keep your bank account safe, don’t clutter your bank statements and use this very simple product to make all your daily life payments one.