How savvy startups are rebooting banking
Mihir Dalal, M. Sriram
More than 190 million Indians are still unbanked. Now, a slew of digital app-based neo banks are going after them
Neo banks raised $116 million in 2019, up seven times year-on-year. While the figure is not huge, what’s striking is that many of these firms have raised seed rounds of $5-20 mn on paper ideas alone
A few months ago, Lizzie Chapman, co-founder of payments platform ZestMoney, joked to a venture capitalist that she should just reposition her lending startup as a “neo bank" in order to attract a higher valuation.
That quirky term has found currency in the startup world rather suddenly. Vinay Bagri, co-founder of NiYO, which is already positioned as a neo bank, says that when his startup launched in 2016, no one, including him, had heard of a neo bank.
Simply put, neo banking is a catch-all term for firms that are attempting to build digital banking startups. Unlike other sectors such as retail and travel, banking hasn’t faced the onslaught of startup-led tech disruption. Until now.
Despite a rapid expansion in Jan-Dhan bank accounts (half of which are rarely used), India currently has the world’s second-largest unbanked population, an estimated 190 million people, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex database. And a race is now on to win their hearts and wallets.
“The whole idea of neo banking is to be able to create a bank on a mobile phone. The cost structures of banks, many of which are based in prime real estate locations, is very high and these costs are eventually passed on to customers," said Bagri. “The idea with neo banking is that if you go mobile, you can dramatically reduce the cost, and you can also improve the customer experience by using technology."
This thesis is inspired partly by the success of startups like Nubank in Brazil, and Monzo, Revolut and N26 in Europe that are transforming traditional banking in their countries by using the internet to deliver services more efficiently. Their fast growth has seen these startups command huge valuations.
For instance, Nubank, which is aiming to be Latin America’s foremost neo bank by providing digital accounts to small businesses along with loans and credit cards, is valued at $10 billion. With investors such as Tencent, DST Global and Sequoia Capital, the bank’s valuation has more than doubled in just a year.
Neo banks in India raised $116 million in 2019, a seven-times jump year-on-year, according to data from Venture Intelligence. While the figure itself is not huge, what’s striking is that many of these companies raised seed rounds of $5-20 million on paper ideas alone without having launched actual products.
Neo banks founded and funded in 2019 alone include epiFi, Jupiter.money, Yelo, Juno, Kaleidofin and EZOTO, besides payments firm Razorpay, which also launched its neo banking arm, RazorpayX. Some like NiYO are targeting retail customers, while others such as Open are serving businesses.
Digital layer
For instance, Nubank, which is aiming to be Latin America’s foremost neo bank by providing digital accounts to small businesses along with loans and credit cards, is valued at $10 billion. With investors such as Tencent, DST Global and Sequoia Capital, the bank’s valuation has more than doubled in just a year.
Neo banks in India raised $116 million in 2019, a seven-times jump year-on-year, according to data from Venture Intelligence. While the figure itself is not huge, what’s striking is that many of these companies raised seed rounds of $5-20 million on paper ideas alone without having launched actual products.
Neo banks founded and funded in 2019 alone include epiFi, Jupiter.money, Yelo, Juno, Kaleidofin and EZOTO, besides payments firm Razorpay, which also launched its neo banking arm, RazorpayX. Some like NiYO are targeting retail customers, while others such as Open are serving businesses.
Neo banks can exploit this weakness and become comprehensive financial services platforms—for specific customer segments, investors and entrepreneurs said.
“A single platform providing a digital layer for payments, accounting, expense management and short-term loans can be tremendously valuable," said Anil Joshi, managing partner at venture capital firm Unicorn India Ventures. He cites the example of Open, one of his portfolio startups that offers accounting, lending and other services to small and medium businesses.
Co-founder of epiFi Sujith Narayanan, who helped launch and oversee the expansion of Google Pay, said that startups will find it tough to become “everything for everyone".
“I don’t think that the big opportunity is to create another conventional banking behemoth—that’s not going to work. If that model was viable, you would have seen payments apps becoming banks already. Rather than trying to create a universal bank, I think the opportunity is actually there in focusing on specific consumer segments and becoming a one-stop financial services platform by helping them demystify finance and make sense of money—where are they spending, how to grow their money, what is the ideal insurance product and so on," he said.
In late-2018, Narayanan and a colleague Sumit Gwalani left Google Pay to launch their startup epiFi. Impressed by their pedigree and plan for building a neo bank, Sequoia India, Ribbit Capital and others pumped in $13.2 million into the startup in what was one of the largest seed-stage funding rounds in recent years. EpiFi will launch its product later this year.
The most attractive customer segment for neo banks are the millennials, who are more willing than older people to switch bank accounts and buy financial services online. Another attractive segment is blue-collar workers, who aren’t well served by traditional banks as they consider them a risky segment to lend to.
Neo banks can have a “huge impact" on people that are underserved by traditional banks and other financial institutions, said NiYO’s Bagri.
“For example, we have a service where users can open bank accounts without having minimum balance, and avoiding maintenance and non-usage charges. Such features are particularly useful for people with low incomes for whom holding traditional bank accounts is not viable. In the case of neo banks, because the technology is built in-house and because the cost structure is lower, we don’t need to charge these fees," he said.
Neo banks can also offer other benefits like charging lower interest rates on loans than traditional banks by devising better algorithms to decipher the creditworthiness of customers, added Bagri.
Street cred
What adds credence to the wave of neo banking startups is the profile of entrepreneurs at these firms. Many of them have expertise in financial services, and some have worked at both financial services and internet firms.
For instance, NiYO’s Bagri worked in the banking sector for nearly 15 years before launching his startup. EpiFi’s founders ran Google Pay and one of them, Narayanan, worked in financial services for a decade before joining Google. The founders of Open, Anish Achutan and Mabel Chacko, are veterans in digital payments and have run and sold a payments startup in the past.
In short: many of the entrepreneurs at neo banking startups are keenly aware of the opportunities and the pitfalls in financial services.
Apart from venture capital-funded neo banking startups, Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal is also betting big on this sector through his new startup Navi Technologies. In January, Bansal, who netted about $1 billion from selling his shares to Walmart, told The Times of India that he will plough a large chunk of the proceeds into expanding Navi. The newspaper estimated Bansal’s proposed investment would be between $400-450 million.
Originally posted on livemint.com
