 So my name is Chaitra, as the founder of Simple, so what Simple does is we are selling peace of mind to users, that's the business we are in, we are a fintech company. So I thought we will spend some time today talking about user experience and when we speak about user experience trust is a very important aspect that often gets missed. So let's just spend some time talking about it today. So just to get a sense here, how many of us in this auditorium would be comfortable opening up our homes to a stranger, that's good. What about let's say you are in a rush and your car is not starting, how many of you would be comfortable hitchhiking or flagging a ride, like a few men in the room, any women, understandably so. So you see that, you know, like speaking about fear, I thought I'll just say this, put it out there, apparently putting it out there helps ease the fear. Fear of public speaking is supposed to be second to fear of death. I don't know what those guys were talking about, right now all I feel is butterflies in my tummy, so please bear with me while we go through this presentation. So speaking of fear, how many of, let's have a show of hands here. How many of you think that most people can be trusted, 15% roughly? How many of you trust the police, institutional trust, political parties, election results? How many of you think that we would be better off as a society if we were to live in a much more trustworthy society? A lot of you. So I cannot change these slides. The flicker is not working, it killed my buzz. This was for the hitchhiking with the stranger slide. Anyway, so sounds like the experts at Harvard University academic researcher, Professor Putnam, who is the Professor of Public Policy agrees with you that we would be much better off if we were living in a much more trustworthy society than the one we live in today. In other words, trustworthiness is really a big deal, right? But when we think about starting new businesses, how many of us think about trust? When we think about design, when we think about applying technology to solve problems, how many of us really think about trust? So that's the one piece that I want to spend some time talking about today. So, you know, social trust is a very nebulous thing, right? Like what does it even matter? And how is it correlated to startups or the economy? So there is an institute in UK called the Behavioral Insights Institute, also called, the nickname is Nudge Team, right? They help the UK government when it comes to tricky tax reforms or implementing public policy, which is going to find it difficult to gain public acceptance. So they conducted a study and they found that trust was not only them, but many, many economists have conducted a study on this topic as to how trust correlates to GDP per capita. And as you can see, the one that's missing, that the highest dot up there is Norway. And you know, at the bottom you see Philippines Zimbabwe Ghana. So there is a clear correlation that emerges between trust and GDP per capita. However, please note the interesting deviations here. Thankfully for us, India despite being on the lower quadrant of GDP per capita is fairly decent on trust. The interesting thing about India is that Indians have more trust amongst individuals and in pockets as opposed to institutions, as was evidenced by the audience here. How many of us trust our political parties or the government? China, on the other hand, is very high on trust for a country that is fairly low on the GDP per capita. United States, you see, is on the other side. They're very high on the GDP per capita, but somewhat average on trust. What that means is that the designs or the innovation, the psychology of design that applies in China and in the United States cannot just be copy pasted into India. It will not work here, right? You have to design something specific for India as an emerging market. So when social trust is low, small businesses find it extremely hard to take off, right? That's the friction it creates. New business initiatives, they find it hard to get off the ground. What that means is as a startup, you might be able to get to your first movers and your early adopters, but to really get to scale, you cannot do that unless you solve for trust. So I thought as part of today's talk, maybe we can spend some time looking at some of the startups that have solved for trust in a very unique way and see if there are any insights that we can derive from these companies, which are not necessarily in the payment space. And maybe that will give us some food for thought as to how we could apply it in our own lives as payment companies. It is simple, we like to talk about trust and how we solve for it. So these are some excerpts of stuff that we keep discussing at work often. So yeah, just one more, I guess quote from David Halpern, who is the CEO of the behavioral insights team, is that trust is a way more powerful predictor of future national growth rates than levels of human capital or skills in the population, right? So I guess India has placed it a reasonably good spot. Okay, so just before we get into the examples of how companies have solved for trust, Abhishek of ASGIC had asked me, what is trust, like what is social trust, right? So I looked it up, like what is social trust? And the best definition I could come up with was social trust is kind of like dark matter, 80% of the universe is made up of dark matter but we do not even realize that there was something called dark matter and that it really affects our lives until recently. So social trust is kind of like that, right? It's there, it's super important but it's not obvious and we don't give importance to it. How many of you have used Ola Auto? How many of you are from Bangalore or Chennai? Excellent. So five years back, if I had asked you, would you prepare for your auto ride? What would your answer have been? You don't trust the auto driver, right? In the scheme of trust, the auto drivers were probably at the lowest, the bottom end of the totem pole. Same here, right? I would have said buzz off, right? Forget about it. However, today we are obviously prepaying for auto rides and taxi rides. Five years back also it was not just the auto when I still remember that when my mother used to call for a taxi, she would threaten the travel agent. Guys remember travel agent? Dinosaurs that used to exist before Ola and Uber. So my mother used to call the travel agent and be like, threaten him to send a driver with a clean car, a clean driver who's not gonna be irritable and who's gonna be flexible, you know, wherever we were going to be with us for a few days, right? So however, today that's something that we take for granted. And how have Ola or Uber managed to achieve this? Of course they've done many things. They've applied technology very smartly. But one of the most clever innovations that they have made was they came up with that two-way rating system, right? So earlier what used to happen was if the guy had a rigged meter, like my most vivid memory of the auto, and I was discussing this with my colleague Roshan yesterday, was like constantly observing the meter, like is it gonna jump, is it rigged? Is it gonna go from 25 to 30 suddenly? Let me catch the guy red-handed, right? Today none of that happened. So what has changed, right? If there was a rigged meter, the worst case, the downside for this guy was at the end of the ride, he would get a tongue-lashing from me and we would spend 15 minutes arguing, but he would walk away with his money and I would leave. And let's say I had hired a taxi and I had made the guy wait, and when I show up late and the guy is obviously disgruntled with me and says something, I would have given him a tongue-lashing saying that how dare you lowly driver talk to me, I have the right to be late, right? There was no repercussions. There was no downside for bad behavior. What does small little hack of having a two-way rating system and making it known publicly and making it kind of mandatory at the end of each ride, just the way they designed it, ensured that certain repercussions got built in. The layer of anonymity got stripped, right? So now I know that I'm gonna be judged based on my behavior by this driver. It kind of became an equalizer, right? He was not a lowly driver anymore. He was the one who was judging me, so I better behave well with him. And similarly, vice versa, right? He started keeping the car clean, started, you know, being polite. So the whole relationship got incentivized to move towards good behavior. So I think one of the most important thing or the takeaways for me when I think about Ola Uber and what they have done today is they thought about the role that incentives play in making good behavior happen, right? There are certain rules of engagement that you would desire in a system. Now how do you ensure that you pay attention that the design that you're creating, is it gonna adversely select for behavior or positively select for behavior? So if you have designed it for the right incentive, then you're good. Let's take another example, right? At the beginning of the talk, I think there was one gentleman here who said that he would be comfortable letting strangers into his house. Are you a host on Airbnb? Yes, so I'm sure whenever you do have a big house, you'll probably start hosting. So I think it was in 2008 when Airbnb had just started and the founders were going around Silicon Valley asking investors, Sandhill Road to invest in them and their pitch basically was that we'll convince people around the world, like perfectly normal people like each one of us in this room who did not raise our hands, who are not willing to let strangers into our house. These guys said that we'll convince them to put up pictures of their homes on the World Wide Web and invite perfect strangers to spend the night at their home, right? Like obviously Silicon Valley did not buy it. YC was fairly young and I'm sure all of you know the story Airbnb took off. They created the website, they convinced some crazy first movers to list, to create listings on their website, but they found that bookings were not coming at the same rate as they expected. Then they took a step back. They analyzed what was going on. The few listings that they had, they looked at what were the listings that were getting slightly better results than the ones that were not. They formed a hunch. Maybe it had something to do with the pictures that were posted, right? So just to verify this hunch, the founders got onto a plane, flew from SF to New York, took out their DSLRs, went door to door taking pictures of the houses, high quality pictures of the listings that were already there in New York City. Bookings started flowing in. Sandhill Road came knocking and today Airbnb, market capitalization is higher than Hilton and Marriott hotels, right? Airbnb you have a 10 year old company, Hilton and Marriott are 90 plus years old. That is the power of design thinking when you really apply your mind and think about the psychology behind the decision making. So I think what these guys did was, they took a step back and they thought, what is the psychology behind the decision making of my user here, right? What is going to be that one thing that will tip them in favor of making this booking? Closer to home, how many of you guys have noticed the quality of pictures on Fresh Menu, right? You would agree that I think one thing Fresh Menu did right, especially early on I remember distinctly is their emailer would show up in my inbox and I would get hungry, the pictures were that good, right? So pictures matter and that can be a tipping point into creating that trust that, hey, my food is delicious, try it out, creating that desire, right? So I think it's important to understand the psychology of the decision making process. Now Airbnb is a great example and it's hugely inspiration to us at Simple because this is not the only design thinking inside the behavioral insight that they derived, there were many more, right? Simple things like they realized that getting the host to talk a little bit about their personal interest on the profile page is going to help future guests create a personal connect with the person and make them more comfortable and go ahead and make the booking. And of course they too came up with the two way rating system and designed it brilliantly to make sure that that's the virtuous cycle of design, right? If I, at home, I may not even fold my sheets. I get up daily, I get out of bed, I get to work, I go back, my bed is unmade. But when I go and stay in an Airbnb, I make it a point every single time to fold my sheets to leave my room neat because I know that I'm going to be rated, I know that I'm going to be judged and the next time I travel, I don't want to be embarrassed by a potential host denying me, you know, denying me a reservation because I don't have a great rating, right? So just by creating, so once again, you have incentives, aligning the incentives and understanding the psychology of the user's purchase decision. Those are the two takeaways for us from Airbnb. Now let's come, Uber and Airbnb are brilliant Silicon Valley based companies. Let's look closer to home. Can you guys think, like anybody here, just trivia question, what do you think was that one pivotal hack or innovation that made e-commerce take off in India, bingo, guys are right. And what did cash on delivery solve for, right? Because the natural order of business was when I make a purchase, goods and money, they need to be exchanged simultaneously. But with digital commerce, you make the purchase first and the goods show up later. Obviously there is a trust deficit. You're thinking, will I like it or not? What if the items get damaged? It doesn't fit, et cetera, et cetera. The best way to solve for it is to make allow for the customer to pay on delivery. Now when Flipkart decided to implement pay on delivery, they looked at what was the options available and cash turned out to have the best user experience, right? Everybody trusted cash, users trusted cash, sellers trusted cash, there was a perceived sense of security around it and more importantly from the user's perspective, a perceived sense of control, right? And that's why cash on delivery to this date, 10 years from when Flipkart started is the predominant mode of payment online. And as people, I mean I know in a payments conference talking about cash is probably heresy, right? But that's the competition that we have to be. For all of us here, if we are doing digital payments, the real competition is cash. So what are all like just to summarize some of the things that we have learned till now, right? Pay attention to what behavior your system design incentivizes. Think first principles, ignore conventional wisdom. So like for example, conventional wisdom in case of Airbnb was that nobody is gonna let a stranger into their home. However, by applying design cleverly, they were able to incentivize and create value for the same thing that went against conventional wisdom, right? When we were starting a simple, the conventional wisdom was that all Indians are crooks. Don't give them credit, right? That's exactly what we've done and we're successful today. So conventional wisdom does not necessarily mean if the truth, I think it's important to figure out what is the psychology behind the user's decision and how can you design your technology end to end. Again, when you think about design, I think one mistake that we make is the only thing about UI, right? It's not about the prettiness of the design. It's about end to end system design, like every little detail that goes from pre-purchase, during purchase to post-purchase if you're talking about payment, right? So now let's look at something. So basically what we've established till now is Ola, Uber, Friggy, Flipkart, Freshmenu, et cetera. They're all continuously innovating on design to solve for trust, right? And I think the question in front of all of us today who are in the payments of the digital money space is how can we work with merchants very closely to solve for some of this? So let's look at something that, you know, when Swiggy and Zomato, well, Zomato came much later, but when Swiggy had started and they were looking at, you know, they were getting people to order food on the app, it to me, it sounded like it's the most convenient thing to do, right? Like you're sitting at work, why bother getting out? Let me just order. But then there were a lot of people. So I was one of the first movers or the early adopters. But there were many, like, Swiggy was, I think, got to that point where they needed to scale. They needed to capture that next level of customer. And when they looked into what was it that was stopping some people from ordering, they realized was that 45 minute window from order placement to the guy coming to your doorstep with the food was a black box, right? There was just no, and the, one of our merchant partners in fact told us that about bulk of the calls that they get from customers is asking about order status during that period, right? So what they did was they solved for it by giving a little more transparency. Now on Swiggy, you can see when the order was accepted, whether the order was accepted by the restaurant or not, the delivery boy showed up, what route he's taking to get to you. The whole thing, so one is not only did Swiggy by doing this, give more comfort to that user who was reluctant because of this black box situation, but also they saved on cost, right? The load on their customer support team decreased and they could use it for some better purposes to delight their customers in other ways. So I think one thing for us in payments to think about by taking the example of Swiggy is that oftentimes when you think of payments you think about just the point of sale, right? Like you complete the payment and you're done. But truly speaking, the transaction itself has a life cycle, right? There is a pre-purchase purchase and a post-purchase scenario to the transaction. Now what if those of us in payments just open up our minds and think, is there a possibility to weave payments into the fabric of the transaction, right? Can it be woven into the life cycle of a transaction? What if instead of at a point in time you could place a hold on the user's account in terms of money when the transaction is made and only once the order is delivered the money actually leaves, the hold is released and the charge is made in the name of the customer? Will that inspire trust? Will that get that next level of customers to start using digital money? Maybe. What is the other source of where currently it's a little bit of a black box, right? Again, another merchant partner told us that 30% of their post-purchase calls are when a return or a refund has happened people call up to us, where is my money, where is my money, where is my money, right? So now is there a way to solve for that? Can we give transparency or visibility into the post-purchase life cycle of the transaction because the payment is attached to a transaction always, right? What if you could allow, if there is a refund or a return similar to the, you know, similar to this one where you see the life cycle of a delivery, right? The status, different stages of delivery you could see the different stages of a return, right? Okay, Swiggy has initiated the return. The gateway is processing it today. The bank now has it. It would have shown up in your account, right? It would give us so much more comfort. What if another source of, I guess, consternation or concern for most people is, what if, and again, this is particular to India, right? This is where I would like to just remind us of that graph that we saw earlier where the difference between United States and India. In America, commerce evolved over a period of 60 years. What that meant was like in 1950s and 60s when Visa Mastercard actually started, the form of commerce was just moving from mom and pop shop to big format retail. And from big format retail, it moved to television catalog buying. From catalog buying, it moved to internet buying and today it's moving to mobile commerce. So in that process, what happened was over a period of 60 years, the customer laws facing customers and treating customer like a king evolved gradually in the United States, right? Therefore, there is a lot of peace of mind that comes because there is trust in the institution. Whereas in India now, you guys go to court, like if you're unhappy with Flipkart, you think the studio over, try and go to court, like that's never gonna do it, right? It's such a waste of time. So the responsibility of innovating for trust falls on the shoulders of us, the private company, entrepreneurs start up, right? So we need to, when you think about innovating, when you think about solving for social trust in the absence of systems that give your customers peace of mind, I guess something that you can think of is how do I give my customer peace of mind when there is a charge back scenario? Of course it happens very few times, but when it does happen, it kind of messes with your mind. And maybe, okay, is there a way to redesign or like go back to first principles, ignore conventional wisdom and rethink of what that experience could look like, where you could convert an unhappy charge back type, the motion in a customer's mind and convert that into a delightful moment because you actually problem solve for that customer, right? One simple thing as a payment company, or people in the digital money space, merchants who are trying to move from cash to digital could think of is giving more control, sense of control to the user where they can initiate a charge back from their dashboard and transparency into its state, right? Maybe instead of billing them, put it on hold while the merchants are looking at it. And why should we think like this, right? I mean, think about it. I'll just tell you an interesting anecdote. Last year, so I moved back to India from the US a couple of years back, right? I'm still paying my student loan. So I had to figure out a way to transfer some funds from my Citibank account in the US to my Bank of America account also in the US. And last year, I was like getting on the, I went online and I tried to do it and I realized there was just, I spent 30 minutes because I was so sure that there has to be a way to transfer that money, right? I'm so accustomed to doing interbank transfers here in India. I was like, there must be a way. Maybe I'm not able to figure out the interface. Finally gave up, called up Citibank customer care and they told me, sorry, ma'am, you cannot do it. There is no physical way for you to transfer money online from your Citibank account to your Bank of America account in the US, right? I was flabbergasted. It's like, I was impressed with what's happening in India. So we in India are in the last few years, if you look at what is happening in financial technology, banking, innovation, even the RBI, right? There is everything that we talk about today, whether it's wallets, UPI, technology is like simple, everything has happened only in the last few years. So we have an incredible opportunity in front of us to think first principle, to reimagine what a payment stack could look like, reimagine how to solve for trust, ignore completely set aside conventional wisdom and rethink how we can create the future of payments and basically it's money flow, right? At the end of the day, transactions are the most granular entity are the atoms of the economy. And if you are able to figure out a way to ensure that commerce is all about value creation as opposed to money transfer alone, right? If that becomes our goal, there is so much for us to do in India and we have the opportunity to leapfrog the rest of the world, right? We can take this innovation and take it to the rest of the world, where there are, which is still dealing with a lot of inefficiencies thanks to the broken ancient rigid banking infrastructure that currently exists in the rest of the world and in India today. The payment companies that's both our opportunity as well as our responsibility and by applying some of these basic design thinking principles, I guess we can create a new future and set an example and create billion dollar companies for the rest of the world.