MobiKwik's Upasana Taku: By 2028, 800 million plus Indians will transact via digital mediums

For Upasana Taku, co-founder and CFO of MobiKwik, the biggest personal milestone has been to pay for her own education. When she got the chance to study at Stanford, her family definitely could not afford the expenses of that education. "I did not have any scholarship at Stanford; I had to either give that up or hustle. I decided to go to Stanford one month before college started. I stayed on the couch of my sister's friends and commuted every day by bus to Stanford, and met more than 100 professors, introducing myself and asking them if they had a position where they could offer me research assistantships or teaching assistantships. Just before college opened, I got a call back from one of the professors from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. They ended up paying for my entire education for two years," says Taku.

The rest is history.

In an exclusive chat with Storyboard18, Upasana Taku, co-founder and CFO of MobiKwik shares her thoughts on receiving an award from the President for being the first woman to lead a payment startup, the need for diversity and inclusion but not at the cost of favouritism, artificial intelligence, the fintech landscape and more.

In 2018, you received the award from the President of India. What are your thoughts on that?

It is not so hard to build a fintech company; at least, it's not as hard as being the first woman astronaut or first woman fighter pilot. Having said that, it feels great to be recognized and acknowledged. It's still a largely male-dominated environment.

If I think about it from the perspective of tech startups or traditional finance banks, there's still a long way to go. It's good to see some familiar faces when one goes to industry events; it's lonely to be the only female leader there. So, it feels good that now we have some more.

How is MobiKwik promoting diversity and inclusion in the ecosystem ?

Given that one of the co-founders is a woman, we always wanted to make sure that there is no favoritism for women, but there is always inclusivity, whether it is our hiring process, our appraisal process, or our promotion process. We see roughly 30-35 percent female participation in our workforce, at both junior and other levels. Within the MobiKwik group, we have five subsidiaries, including MobiKwik, and every subsidiary has a woman executive director. We definitely have a seat at the table; we have had many women who joined us, in their mid to late 20s and during their six to seven years stints at MobiKwik, they have gotten married and had children. We have had fairly supportive and collaborative environments; it's not very hard to create an inclusive workforce and a company; it's just a little bit about having open minds.

Currently, what are some market trends and consumer insights that you have been noticing in the fintech space and how is MobiKwik leveraging them?

Fintech presents a very large opportunity in India. India is the third largest fintech market in the world, and it is also the sector which has seen the highest amount of foreign direct investment in the last five to six years. Today, India has about 400 million users i.e. around 30 percent of our population who are actively transacting via digital mediums.

By 2028, this number is expected to double. About 800 million plus people will be actively transacting digitally. Currently this market in India is about $1 trillion. That's why, we see so many banks, mutual fund companies and NBFCs in this play. By 2028, the market is expected to become a $4 trillion market from $1 trillion. While the customer base is expected to double in terms of the size of the opportunity, it's going to be 4X just in the next four to five years. Therefore, fintech continues to be a very exciting sector in India; both traditional financial institutions and pcoming technology companies like ours coexist.

We use our payments business as the foundation of our business. After we acquire both users and merchants, we enable them to make payments via QR code on the app via UPI or on the website. After they start transacting, we start assessing the data and decide what other financial products we can offer them; we resemble a bank in that sense as we offer credit products, investment products, insurance products and advisory products. Bear in mind that, we are the distributor and not the creator of these products. The creator is a bank, a mutual fund company or a NBFC. We are really good at curating the product and making it simple so that it can be delivered very easily over a smartphone. This is very important for a large market like Indi; getting that distribution and curation right is what fintechs are good at.

Currently AI is a buzzword. How is MobiKwik leveraging that?

We have used some elements of machine learning in our understanding of our users' data to figure out the propensity for which user to be interested in which financial product.

Also, we use AI as well as machine learning in our operations facing the consumers and the merchants. However, in terms of utilizing generative AIto the hilt, we are still working on building some of these applications and models that will help us in our overall business. Currently we are already using it in data to understand the users and for better profiling of our users and merchants, to understand their needs and also in our operations. We are working on the next level solution using Gen AI.

Give us an idea about MobiKwik’s media mix.

We are a digital first company and we are fully focused on distributing our products via app stores as well as the web, whether it is Facebook, Instagram, email marketing, notifications-led marketing. All the digital channels like YouTube display are very important for us for user and merchant acquisition. We also look at all the traditional channels, including radio, television, and print. We go down the regional level in terms of tapping into the markets because most of our users are in the tier 2-3 cities of India.

Can you take us through the demographic base of MobiKwik?

We are present in 99 percent of the pin codes in India, starting from Ladakh to Kanyakumari. Most of our users are in their 20s and 30s with 65 percent males and 35 percent females. Most of them are early adopters of technology; we are stronger in the northern states. Most of our users are either doing their first or second job or they are self-employed and doing their own business. The average earnings for them range between Rs. 25,000 to 50,000; 70-75 percent of our users are from Tier 2, 3 and 4.

How is MobiKwik standing out from its competition?

MobiKwik is known for being one of the most capital efficient companies in the fintech sector. Companies like Zerodha specialize in one single vertical like investments; for Policybazaar, it's insurance. MobiKwik is running profitably at the PAT level since the beginning of the current financial year.

We have achieved our current scale of revenue by having raised the least amount of capital as compared to all the other fintech companies. We probably have the lowest staffing, which itself is close to 1000 people as compared to all the other large fintechs in India. But even with that employee base, we are able to deliver more than a crore of revenue per employee.