Prime Venture Partners Podcast

India Fintech 1.0 - Pre Aadhaar & Smartphones with Srikanth Rajagopalan, Anshul Rai & Sanjay Swamy

• Prime Venture Partners: Early Stage VC Fund • Season 1 • Episode 142

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Introducing Prime’s special series on ‘Fintech in India - Past, Present and the Future’. This is the 1st episode titled ‘India Fintech 1.0 -  Pre Aadhaar & Smartphones’ in a 3 part series.

In this special series of episodes, Sanjay Swamy, our Managing Partner speaks with industry stalwarts Srikanth Rajagopalan and Anshul Rai. Srikanth is currently the CEO of Perfios Account Aggregation (AA), an off-shoot from the Perfios legacy. Anshul is the Co-Founder and ex CEO of Happay, his claim to fame is Happay’s celebrated exit to CRED for $180M. 

Watch this episode to learn firsthand experience from 2 of India’s first mobile payments entrepreneurs Sanjay (mChek) and Shrikant (ngpay). They share memorable anecdotes and valuable lessons on frugal innovation such as how IRCTC and Telcos helped solve distribution at scale. 

This episode ends as a great segue to the 2nd generation of Fintech in India that will be highlighted in episode 2, stay tuned! 

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Srikanth Rajagopalan:

My life's ambition was to be a quantum physicist, but then life had other plans.

Anshul Rai:

I think I used to sort of feel at social sciences, history and all sorts of subjects. I was a very underconfident guy.

Sanjay Swamy:

You know what you saw of the world. There we kind of competed, I guess, but we were also really partners in crime in many ways.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

The big beast in the room was IRCTC.

Sanjay Swamy:

Most people don't understand that a SIM card is actually a computer, as they say. You know, it's good to be on the leading edge, but not good to be on the bleeding edge. So much for my branding of distributing on 350 minutes.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

Cut that part from the show. Hi everybody.

Sanjay Swamy:

This is Sanjay Swamy here. Welcome again to a new episode of the Prime Venture Partners podcast. This time we have a couple of people as guests on the podcast, two of the very early names in the whole fintech financial ecosystem, and you can guess we're going to be talking about fintech and financial services today. You can guess we're going to be talking about fintech and financial services today. So welcome Srikanth, the CEO of Perfios Account Aggregator Services, which is a part of the Perfios group. Thank you. Thank you for having me and Anshul Rai, co-founder and CEO of Happay, now exited to CRED. Welcome, Anshul.

Anshul Rai:

Thank you, Sanjay. Thank you for having me. I'm no longer the CEO.

Sanjay Swamy:

Yes, co-founder and CEO at the time and now, of course, exited to CRED. So welcome to the episode. So this whole space of FinTech financial services has always been the next big thing in India. Srikanth and I have fond memories of the very early days, probably circa 2005. And then, all of a sudden, it's had an explosive growth over the last five, seven years ago, maybe even a decade.

Sanjay Swamy:

So the purpose, what we thought of in today's discussion is to actually talk about a little bit of the journey, of where things started, what were some of the key systemic inflection points that happened and what has got us to here. And, of course, towards the end, we'll also talk a little bit about where we think the opportunities are and where do we go from here in the overall fintech financial services space, both for entrepreneurs here in India as well. In hearing your perspectives of where the opportunities lie and we'll try to keep this as conversational and a lot of people have sent in some questions on the internet, so I'll try to incorporate all of those. So, once again, welcome to the two of you. So maybe we'll start with a round of introductions, right? Maybe, Srikanth, you can start a little bit with your background and what got you into this domain and kept you in this domain for about 20 years now. So you definitely must either be really good at it or like it, or, you know, maybe you have some views. But let's get started with that.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

Actually, interestingly, I wanted to. My life's ambition was to be a quantum physicist, but then life had other plans, uh, so I ended up in sales, right, so I started, uh started my career with fmcg sales companies like asian paints and coke, and then happened to join amex in setting up their credit card sales. And then happened to join Amex in setting up their credit card sales and then merchant acquiring business in India. This is way back in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And then you know, like in most payments guys, I mean, that bug got right. Amex was a very unique place. It's a closed loop network which means you see the transaction end-to-end and there's some fantastic magic you can create on that. So that was my initiation into what we today call payments tech, fintech, the various words for that. But that was a solid grounding.

Sanjay Swamy:

So maybe we can even step back a little bit. Which part of India are you from? Childhood ambitions, inspirations, things like that, okay, it's complicated.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

Because I was born in Hyderabad brought up in Kolkata and started my career in Madurai. I know some of you will search Google Maps or I searched Atlas. At that time, when I got my first job, my biggest how shall I say? Foundational anchors were really my parents. Mom was a scientist. She was part of the team that designed the heat shield for President Kalam's missiles, which we discovered after she retired. She said by the way, you know, I did this. That was a chemical engineer and a lawyer and he was one of the guys who set up what is today called the TRIPS, which really allows the pharma industry to manufacture generics at scale way back in the 80s. So that intellectual grounding, that quest for excellence, has been inborn since then. Of course, academically it never showed up. We'll hush that part of it. There's still a picture.

Sanjay Swamy:

There's still a picture.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

No, no, the picture is done. But then. So I started off with a degree in physics, which is where I thought that quantum physics was my thing to be. But then uh, didn't get through to a postgraduate. Then they did the most obvious thing. After that founder found a career, related uh course, jumped into an MBA and from then it's been one corporate slash, um slash startup career after another. So a lot of my career graph has been a series of happy accidents, right, basically being at the right time at the right place and made the best use of the opportunity. I think that's really what an entrepreneur's life has all been about. So that's the background.

Sanjay Swamy:

Great, and we'll come back to the specifics, because I know from Amex you went to NGPay and then to Nokia Money, oboe Pay, then back to Amex and Amazon and now back to being at a earlier or a relatively mid-size startup. So, anshul, maybe a little bit about your background startup.

Anshul Rai:

so, anshul, maybe a little bit about your background. So my dad he was mtech in civil was in a government job, so we kept moving. I grew up in Haryana but we moved to Punjab, then back to Chandigarh. I think the only I would say the only superpower I had while I was a little kid was maths. I don't think I think I used to sort of feel at social sciences, history and all sorts of subjects, but I think maths is something I'll actually cover two classes in advance, right, and that was my real superpower. I think that maths was what saved me during my IT days as well. Finally, I think we were in Nangal, which is a small township for engineers who are working in Bhakarada, and my dad told me that, look, we should go prepare for IIT and landed up in Delhi.

Anshul Rai:

Spent two years in Delhi, 11th and 12th, preparing for JEE, somehow cleared the JEE again, math saved me, barely crossed the minimum marks required for chemistry, but finally landed at IIT, kharagpur for, as a mechanical engineer. Again, there, math saved me. I was good at actually physics and math, so did very well in mechanical first year and ended up changing my branch from mechanical to computer science post first year. There's a provision to change your branch at IIT Kharagpur, spent next three years but kept regretting for the entire three years that why did I change my branch? Like I was a topper in mechanical and I was literally no one in computer science, I was struggled a lot in computer science and was a very underconfident guy when I graduated.

Anshul Rai:

I graduated in back in 2010, joined Microsoft, work there for about two years, but I think while working at microsoft I realized that uh, uh, naturally I may not be very good at something, but, uh, I'm very good at putting a lot of hard work into anything I want to do and then I'll figure out a way to crack it. Like I will not shy away from spending crazy hours and just to learn about the industry, to solve a problem, to learn something new. And yeah, I worked there for two years and that was Microsoft research. Microsoft research I don't know if you know basically figures out that what next for Microsoft? So you work on a lot of research projects may not have a direct impact on business or product immediately. So I realized that it is not very exciting because whatever project you're working on will have impact on Microsoft products or business five years or 10 years down the line. And so I asked my manager. I said, like where do you see the immediate impact of whatever you do? He said that you only see in startups.

Anshul Rai:

And at that time Bhish, founder of Ola. Right, we used to report to same manager. We had an overlap of about three months, so when I joined Microsoft he was just leaving Microsoft to start Ola. So he also had a lot of influence on me. He used to come to office. I was like you know, what are you doing here?

Sanjay Swamy:

Why are you doing this Like?

Anshul Rai:

you should go and start something. Why are you doing this? Like you should go and start something. And I think finally, after two years at Microsoft, I decided saying you know, look, I don't know what I'll do, but I'll definitely not continue at Microsoft, I'll figure out what I'll do. And then the entire startup journey started.

Sanjay Swamy:

Wonderful. So we'll come back. We'll go a little back and forth here, right, and actually my journey is actually sort of a combination of the two of y'all A few decades earlier I guess. But I grew up in a small town in Norrisa. Dad was an HAL setting up the big engine factory there at a time when there was. You know, when people told me, look at the airplane, I would look on the ground and then my mom had to say you've got to look up, there was literally nothing out there.

Sanjay Swamy:

But yeah, math was sort of the first love. And then, you know, came to Bangalore, did my schooling and then my undergrad here locally and then went to France for a couple of years and then went to the us university of washington and then worked in the silicon valley for about 11 years. So I never did a startup over there. It was still always in the startup ecosystem. Right, you can't be in silicon valley without inhaling the, at least least by radiation. I got a lot of the startup thing.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

And then a lot of other stuff there.

Sanjay Swamy:

Came back to India yeah, we should keep those for after the show but came back here in the early 2000s. And then, of course, I think our paths crossed during the first phase of sort of this whole mobile payment, the mobile commerce era. So, Srikanth, you can talk about this 2005 to 2010 era pre-Aadhaar, pre-mobile wallets and things like that. You joined ngpay and they were sort of the pioneer in mobile commerce and I was brought in as CEO of mChek and we were running it from the payments perspective. So why don't you start with? You know what you saw of the world there. We kind of competed, I guess, but we were also really partners in crime in many ways.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

Right. So what we identified, really, and the core of what we were trying to solve, was a distribution problem. Everything else, like the app, the, you know, apis.

Sanjay Swamy:

So this was in the era of Java phones, and those were the smartphones of the era.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

No smartphones. I mean, you had those Nokia phones with the T9 keyboards. They were much more useful as physical weapons and they would survive everything.

Sanjay Swamy:

It's true, there were ads showing that a truck could run over the Nokia 1100 and it would survive.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

And networks were 2G, you had to actually send an SMS to an operator to get GPRS settings and you would open internet in a session. People here would not know what.

Sanjay Swamy:

GPRS is, by the way.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

That was the data network of the past, not just another four-letter word, but those were the constraints we were working under and, looking back now, those constraints made you work far more innovatively and frugally than what people are used to today. I mean, look at the kind of infrastructure you have today and the things that we take for granted which never existed back in the day, to your point, identity networks, etc. Which never existed back in the day, to your point, identity networks etc. But even then we spotted an opportunity where distribution was a key problem that we were trying to solve, specifically of digital goods. Even back in the day, there were about five times the number of mobile phones in people's hands than desktop computers or laptop computers. So we said, if digital commerce has to start, it has to start on a mobile phone. And if you start backward and work backwards from that, what are the problems that you need to solve for? One is discoverability, the second is the user experience and the third is the fulfillment, and fulfillment was a nightmare at that time. So we stayed away from anything to do with physical fulfillment, very contrary to what Flipkart started. In fact, the anecdote is that we guys Flipkart and NGP started about two blocks away in Koramangala, around six months before and after each other.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

So we narrowed down our focus to saying that anything that has a digital discovery, purchase and fulfillment is a starting point for mobile commerce back in the day. So then we built a whole bunch of technology stacks behind it, but then, like in most cases, we found that the app's distribution was a huge bottleneck. There were no app stores at that time, there were no smartphones. There was no way to go and get a customer to download an app right. First you had to tell a person what an app really was, and then why should I download it? And then how do I use it? It was massive in terms of customer education.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

So you spend the first 8-10 months trying various marketing tools right, getting people to test and use and all that stuff. What we found is that once somebody downloaded it adoption and repeat use it was massive and it was coming from all the tier two and tier three towns, not from your Delhis and Bombays only. And then we called up people. We actually sat with them. We found that a lot of people were actually doing transactions on behalf of somebody else Booking a train ticket for somebody else Booking a I don't know a bus ticket to Red Bus on behalf of somebody else. So in each of these clusters you have people who are slightly digitally smarter, who know how to use the stuff. They are actually booking on behalf of 10 other people, very interesting. The travel agent informal they didn't call themselves that, but informally they were the exactly that, and that was your retention hook as well.

Anshul Rai:

essentially.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

That was also a retention hook, because if you get more and more of these people to transact on other people's behalf then you know that network effect hopefully catches up. But we still never cracked the scale problem on distribution. So then we kind of figured okay, let's go where distribution already is. And in those days and I think still today, the big beast in the room was IRCTC, the number one digital merchant and the monopoly in their business. Right, I mean, you could not book a ticket except for IRCTC, and their website had the highest traffic in all of Asia. So we kind of went and spoke with them. They said, okay, you want to sell tickets on the phone, that's fine. I mean, give an agency code, you sell and you make whatever commissions that you get. I still remember we got 20 rupees per AC ticket, 10 rupees per non-AC ticket and 2 rupees per undeserved ticket. So that was the commercial model that ICTC gave us and we ran with it for some time.

Sanjay Swamy:

Then I said, hey, but you had to take care of all the payment processing and all of that everything all the stuff that goes behind it.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

Then we figured, listen, I mean, are we getting the best out of this relationship? So we went back to them and said, sir, you do this Hindi and English together. Okay, you do this. You close 10 rupees, 20 rupees. Give a download link on your website. Just let people download the app from your website. I don't want your 10 rupees, 20 rupees on 1000 transactions download links. They didn't understand the value of that real estate at that time, right I?

Prime Venture Partners:

mean it?

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

was worked to our advantage. We didn't have to pay for it. You know too much, apart from, you know, making do without some of the commissions. And that turned the tide for us. Within a week, my IT guy was, you know, shifting his place of residence and everything to commercial street.

Prime Venture Partners:

How, do I buy so many?

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

servers and all that stuff. No cloud, no AWS, no Google Cloud, nothing right. So it was phenomenal. I mean, it just showed us that if you get the proposition straight, if you keep the customer need front and center and if you look at solving distribution problems through non-traditional means, you can actually create magic.

Sanjay Swamy:

Very cool, very cool. Maybe I'll share a little bit of what we were doing on the other side. We were two blocks away from Flipkart on the opposite side.

Anshul Rai:

Okay, Also in Koramangala.

Sanjay Swamy:

And I guess M-Check's story was, of course it had been incubated in the little world and then spun out into a new entity and uh, dfj initially, and then nexus were the vcs and I think the the focus there was payments first. Right, I think that was a different uh thing to approach the problem from, and I was personally very passionate. In fact I literally moved back to India when I saw an auto rickshaw driver. When I asked him time, he pulled out the phone. I said oh my God, he has a terminal in his hand and then sort of this whole thing of a phone could be used for payments sort of became the thing. And then later I found out about the regulatory system and what was there, et cetera, and then we tried to play within the rules, right. But I think for us the philosophy was look, distribution can only be solved at scale through the telcos at that time, and the one weapon that they had was a SIM card. And so maybe if there was a way to put an app on the SIM card and I remember having early conversations with you later saying these are things that are possible on the SIM card most people don't understand that a SIM card is actually a computer and you can put an application on it. It's just that it has to be approved by the telcos and has to be burnt in. You know, in the factory there's very little over the air freedom, and at the time the telcos had 8k and 16k sim cards and mchek ended up in the lightest weight form in like a 15k app and but so we sort of helped migrate the telcos to the 64k world and the sim card manufacturers are pretty thrilled about it and so on. But that was still just the empty physical wallet, so to speak. But the payment instruments that had to be put in there were actually banking instruments, right. So you had to go and partner with two industries, get a distribution through one, but then the actual product was actually from somewhere else and all the stuff that you know apple pay has done today with tokenization and all that stuff is actually what we did in that generation.

Sanjay Swamy:

Uh, we used to call it an add-on card and a digital card, etc. But, as you said, there was nothing at the time, so we had to have a data center. There's some pretty comical stories as well, because Visa, who was the association that we were working with, they had what was called a card personalization bureau and that's where the card gets your name written on it and so on. At the time there was no concept of a digital card. So the card personalization bureau had sort of you know, had some very fancy rooms that we spent, you know, several crores or millions of dollars trying to set up. There was actually a room where you were weighed. You went into the room and then on the way back they would check your weight again, right, so that you couldn't steal the plastic right. And in order to get the center certified, I needed to show a physical safe and I said but we don't have plastic, this is a digital card.

Sanjay Swamy:

He said no there is no, you have to have a checkbox, it needs to have a safe. So, just, I was so irritated I said we will have a safe, but it doesn't say it should be closed. So we kept the safe open at all times. But we kept the safe open at all times. But we were forced to buy a safe right. One of those comical moments. But you know I could. I mean they said, look, someday a regulation will come for a digital purse of bureau, but till that happens, if you want to get approved, buy a safe.

Anshul Rai:

I said, okay, fine, let's go out and buy the safe.

Sanjay Swamy:

Right. But you know there was also a time when the regulator was also trying to come to grips with what is this beast called a cell phone, right? Or a wireless phone, because they were used to sort of the computer and web-based payments. And you know, at that time India did not even have the second factor mandate right, so it was still in a single factor. There was a bit of fraud happening because you just needed a card number, x by the cvv2, and you could do a transaction and, uh, you know, we sort of I remember, uh, sorabh and I were, you know, from ngpay and and we used to literally sit in rba's office and start, you know, helping with them. We probably written some chapters in the 2008 mobile banking guidelines, right, but I had to hand it to the regulator that they moved really fast. They said, look, this is a real thing and we would rather have it regulated and have some guidelines around it, so we know what to allow for, what not to allow for and things like that, and fast forward to, I would say, 2008-9.

Sanjay Swamy:

You know we we managed to get, you know, crazy distribution right, because mcheck got put on the sim cards of both airtel and later Docomo and in fact in M-Check we had a pop-up that would come every time you turn on your phone that said you know, welcome to M-Check on Airtel, click here to get started. And so distribution of the physical wallet was at astronomical scale. We probably must have shipped 300, 350 million SIM cards with this on it. But people were churning out of the telco systems also pretty fast. But the other half of it, which was getting people to actually open a bank account and preload the debit card into the wallet, that was, like you know, way too much friction, right, because there was no pre-Aadhaar days. That was part of the reason I decided to sort of chat with the Aadhaar team and then, of course, nandan brought us in as volunteers. He said it would take three weeks to open a bank account, right, even for the person who submitted the form and took the photograph and KYC. The cost was to be borne by somebody and it just was a technology. We were probably two generations early on the technology, as they say. You know, it's good to be on the leading edge, but not good to be on the bleeding edge, and you know the knives were really sharp when we started in that uh. So we probably made a lot of mistakes, also in hindsight, but I think individually we solved some pieces of the problem, but nobody collectively solved the problem right.

Sanjay Swamy:

There was also paymate as a third player. There was tagget that did the pvr movie booking. Was also Paymate as a third player? There was Tagit that did the PVR movie booking. It was the first time you could select the seats of a movie ticketing and things like that. We tried. You know USSD. You know it worked great whenever I used it, but the session would fail half the time and you know whether you're booking a flight ticket or you're booking a movie ticket. It was like it could work, but or you're booking a movie ticket. It was like it could work, but for it to be robust and scalable it just didn't thing, and I think so. That was that first era and, interestingly, paymate has survived because they pivoted and moved into more of a B2B space and then, of course, aadhaar came right as we move on. And it'd be interesting Anshul, you were a student at the time in school during the first thing so did any of these products? Did you come across them? Maybe a friend using ng pay or something like?

Anshul Rai:

that I think ng pay. I remember uh. Thank you uh so much for my branding of distributing on 350 cut that part from the show ng pay, I remember.

Anshul Rai:

but uh, I think we were also uh thinking that you know, how did they basically get this? Killer good to hear that story of uh irctc, right, uh, because I think at that point in time, obviously the you know, the distribution was the key right, like, how do you really acquire large number of customers? I mean, it is not like a digital era where people are ready in today's day and age, right, any new product you launch, right, I mean, people would, people are open now to experiment with new products, they will download it, try it out, and all of that right. But NGP had a massive distribution and we kept thinking like, how did they really crack this? But how did they really crack this? But Mcheck, I'm not sure, sanjay, I probably didn't have a phone, you needed a SIM.

Anshul Rai:

you didn't need a phone.

Sanjay Swamy:

By the way, in Mcheck we used to find people who actually those who used it similar model, using for others. They would have their SIM card, which was activated, which had the bank account in it, but they didn't have a phone, so they would borrow somebody's phone it in do their transactions and take out the SIM and different people use the same phone.

Sanjay Swamy:

So we even had done experiments around. Okay, can we create like a shared phone version of it, it's like? But we also at the time, I have to say, experimented with, like QR code based payment, because we also had a version right. I still remember testing out on my on a website you know, on a mock website like paying with a QR code right. So it was like a lab. I think in some ways we did everything possible.

Anshul Rai:

But that time most of the phones had no camera.

Sanjay Swamy:

No, no, no no.

Sanjay Swamy:

The Java phones already had from 2006 onwards, they all had cameras as well. It was early days, these and, uh, I think one thing was clear, at least for me to continue to stick later, you know, and continue in this domain a bit now more as an investor was when it worked. It was awesome, right, and we would do prepaid recharges and bill payments and stuff for it, and that would ended up being the main focus. We're probably doing 30 40 lakhs a a day on a good day, right, which is not a small volume, right, especially at that time, which meant that we were doing several tens of crores or 100 crores over the course of a year.

Sanjay Swamy:

And prepaid recharge had a built-in model there, right, because the commercial model is we're paying 3%, 4% in the value chain. So there was a business model there, etc. And those who used it would hardly churn the moment somebody could do this thing click, click, enter your PIN and your recharge is done or your bills are paid, you're hooked. So that Kunal talks about this Delta 4 experience. That definitely provided it at that point in time, but it just was.

Anshul Rai:

If only someone could use it.

Sanjay Swamy:

If somebody could use it right, and that was the first part. That was I think the biggest issue, right yeah?

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

sorry to interrupt, but, um, this is a lovely anecdote. I won't name the person, but, uh, the head, the founding ceo of one of the largest uh online travel agents. At that time, um, I was in his office pitching to him saying great product, doing a demo and all that kind of stuff, and all of a sudden he had to take a trip. He had to take an urgent trip to back to Bangalore or whatever it is, and he said, okay, chalo, I bought him his ticket. I bought him his ticket on NGP because his secretary had gone, gone back home, there were no laptops at home. Right, gone back home, uh, there were no laptops at home. Right, the travel agent was 9 am to 5 pm or7 pm, whatever it is, and he didn't want to go and try his luck at the airport. So I booked him his ticket and said here's a ticket order the sms just go, take a printout to the airport the next day. The deal was signed.

Sanjay Swamy:

Yeah, I can imagine I mean, some of the things we experienced right in that era. I mean, everybody had to expose APIs for the first time, right.

Sanjay Swamy:

So Airtel's billing system that was the first time there was one where you could query the amount and where you could post a successful payment with the auth code et cetera, right after that, right, because we wanted the next. Second, if the customer says it checks their bill, it should say paid right, and that had never been done earlier. Earlier it was always. Even if went to their own stores it would say it'll be paid after. You know it'll be updated after 72 hours or something like that. Bill desk, of course, had done a lot of sort of the groundwork in getting all the best com and they used to run visa bill pay and all of these utilities. But even there it was sort of a bad system. But they were also again a new age company, so they exposed APIs or they were working on it.

Sanjay Swamy:

I remember once in our case, airtel migrated from their in-house system to IBM because they did that big agreement and IBM, magically, one day you know, some customer was paying a thousand rupee bill ended up paying a lakh. And I said what happened? They said, oops, we just upgraded the API. The new version is all in paisa, not in rupees and paisa. But it happened. And then we had to coordinate with IBM and say, okay, circle by circle when you're taking them live, because we had to have a flag that said, okay, this circle is now on the paisa-based system, not on the.

Prime Venture Partners:

but you know, of course we remorse that customer, that I told it.

Srikanth Rajagopalan:

But you know, these were extraordinary sort of moments and you look and say wait a minute.

Sanjay Swamy:

I thought an api was supposed to take care of it, but it's the first generation of some of that stuff. But you know, today we take it for granted. Right now there is bbps and all of these things. You know we can have complete interoperability. So it's come a long ways and, uh, it's probably a good segue into the start of that. You know where we have ended up now, and that was probably the adhar journey and that's where that started. And in parallel, I think by that time the telcos had kind of realized that trying to do this in partnership with the banks is you're never going to be able to plan anything.

Prime Venture Partners:

And so there, was a strong push for mobile wallets. And and, of course, now we have complete interoperability with UPI and the banking system. and you'll be the first one to know when new episodes are available. Just search for Prime Venture Partners Podcast in Apple Podcast, spotify, castbox or however. You get your podcasts, then hit subscribe and if you have enjoyed the show, we would be really grateful if you leave us a review on Apple Podcast. To read the full transcript, find the link in the show notes.