 Hello to everyone and thank you for joining us here on the Capital Insider series today as we get to talk with Anup Chen who is the managing partner and also he's been one of the sort of he's seen the entire landscape of being an entrepreneur as well as being an investor working with the startup and guiding startups and now investing in startups at his role in Oreos Ventures and Oreos indeed has been doing across the spectrum early stage funding for a lot of startups so right from consumer tech startups to you know tech startups but today what we're really going to touch upon with him is to understand the FinTech which has been a very very large space and very wide canvas space I would say and so we're really going to sort of touch base with him on what he sees as the future of FinTech and other startups particularly post the pandemic how things are going to pave out and what what's going to happen always happy to have questions from our audience or whatever you want to ask what if whatever it is that you would like to sort of want Anup to answer so please just put your question right out there in the Q&A box or on Facebook as you wish we will put it on across to Anup and we will make sure that he answers it today. Anup of course as you can see has done a lot of work not just in the digital space but also in the physical space as well he's been part of Yambran's Bata as well in the retail space and now of course he's in the VC space where he is guiding as well as investing in D2C brand social commerce edtech but we talked with him today about FinTech which is a growing space and has changed quite dynamically during the pandemic so welcome Anup wonderful having you here today you know let me start with asking you this that how do you see that in the current times that investing pace in FinTech has changed and where is it heading towards within the FinTech space because it's so large and what are the areas of FinTech as a fund you would be interested to look at now. Sure so thank you so much for inviting me to always a pleasure to hang out with you if I may call it yeah and one has met you in several conferences so I'm respect you highly so thank you for having me over and I hope the audience loves our session today finds it useful. FinTech look post COVID stock I think the first quarter was extremely uncertain so many FinTechs actually stopped operations particularly in the areas of lending so that definitely took a backseat in fact that extended into the second quarter as well even our investments we felt that it's better to be safe than to be sorry it was it was more important to ensure that you have a healthy loan book than an ever expanding loan book so you need to be standing on a solid foundation in a FinTech business especially in lending so that definitely took a bit of a back seat and what that has done is as one has come out I think lending started back again in August September as the economy started to roll back and we saw the impact on the overall you know GST collections as a good indicator of formal economy starting back and so we saw October and September coming back to pre-COVID levels very close to pre-COVID levels so that's when the lending started to fall back again but the period basically helped in separating the men from the boys so to speak so those who had expanded the loan book but with a greater degree of risk they found a lot of NPAs on their loan books and therefore they were less healthy as businesses coming out and that put a lot of stress and some startups would have shut down for sure if they had gone very aggressive and of course the the other part was that you know investors started to look at financials extremely minutely than ever before there was a somewhat of a bull run as far as VC investing was going on and that with starting with the global phenomenon of we were getting you know marked down and some of these sectors getting badly hit travel, hospitality, leisure, entertainment and you know these real estate related verticals that certainly meant that there was a you know parallel impact and therefore some part of the portfolio being exposed to some of these verticals everybody started to sort of get a little more conservative in every other sector so there was there was a slowdown in investing for every VC firm and so it was for us I think it was also very operational oriented because we didn't know when this whole thing was going to end and therefore were we good with making decisions purely over a zoom call I think over a period of time we've all crossed that hurdle and we've all come around the bend looking and feeling more confident and being able to make decisions so we've made a recent decision in the marketplace model purely you know never met the founders never visited their office just very recently so that trend I think has started off every VC firm was looking at protecting their existing portfolio firms and seeing what they can do and we were no different it was our first port of call in the fintech side the themes that are emerging are going to be definitely micro payments that's a big theme for us we've already invested in a company called CityCash you know not too long ago of course during COVID mobility and public shared mobility came to a full stop I mean metro's buses were all shut trains are shut but that has come back again so micro payments is back in focus because in India you know a large portion of the middle class is still uncovered through digital payments I know UPI is doing one one billion dollars a payment a month and all of that but all of that is happening amongst people like us so to speak so people living in the top cities what's happening is you know if you yourself noticed that Marithu and I'm sure everybody in the audience would have noticed we have credit cards we have debit cards but we are not having to take them out of our pockets and swipe them on a machine so we are getting used to using our smartphone which has the same credit card debit card embedded in an application and then scanning the QR code and putting the UPI pin and straight away debiting the amount or you know charging it to a credit card much more convenience also much more convenience secure you don't you know you're not scared of cloning etc so I think there what's happening is that there is a churn which is happening within the existing place right everybody's into everybody's share and then that WhatsApp has got its approvals coming in through the geo WhatsApp combination so that's a new player in the ring but micro payments has not been touched micro payments are defined by BCG as less than 150 rupees and that's what India lives on for 400 million people you know data they take shared public transport rides paratransit rides of autos it's electric rickshaws etc all within 10 20 rupees 30 rupees 40 rupees etc they eat at stalls hawkers etc the denominations are the same nobody's really digitized that and the way to digitize that is through NFC and you have to acquire large millions of consumers through the public bus transport system so we certainly saw that as a upcoming space and therefore have invested in a company called CityCash which got a contract from MSRTC now they're piloting at other public bus transport corporations and hope to change the micro payments industry the other bit I think again I'll refer to the BCG report quite literally and you know that's just to give an anchor to everybody it is available on the internet I think so urban India has been defined into you know sort of the very H&I's than India one India two into three so the India one and India two is extremely over-serviced right so they got they got in fact they don't want to pick up their phones right because there's so many sales cows coming through trying to sell the same guy yet another credit card yet another loan and all that is they don't need but on the other hand India three is underserved and that is because the there is not much money to be made you know so frankly there's a large number of people buying a cheap insurance policy for three lakh rupees with a 1000 rupee premium means nothing to a agent in terms of commissions right because they simply have to sell it to dozens and thousands of consumers to be able to make a living out of it which is sufficient enough for them to feed their families at the end of the month so obviously this job has to be done by technology it cannot be done by an individual it's not worth their time so nobody does it so there is no distribution model nobody cares about that plus the the population is is is thin on terms of disposable income so one has to do automated technology based underwriting and therefore be able to have very low cost of acquisition operations and underwriting to be able to make the whole model sustainable for both the consumer and the insurer on the insurance side as well as maybe on the lending side so these kind of models are now in focus which are serving the underserved right so we see firms both impact and those which focus on ESG as well both of them are interested in models like these which are creating if I may say a bajaj for the India three there is a bajaj for tier one but where is the bajaj finance for tier three or India three so that is is is pretty much required bear in mind also that you know combined with the first thing that I said which is this audience is mostly relying on micro payments which are mostly done in cash cash leaves not race so there is there is no digital footprint there is no data how do I lend you money if I don't know how your expenses were what your income was what your ins and outs were so I think that needs to get captured and that's coming on right now more more and more you know as we as we go along this is the these are the financial behemoths of tomorrow so the bajaj finance for India three is yet to be created the visa and mastercard for India three is yet to be created these are the large opportunities in the fintech space on the insurance side I think it will get similarly done so we've had a few models which are socially distributed like total men etc and these will continue to be exploited for reaching out to people who are beyond the India one or the over-serviced population on the wealth side what we are seeing is right now there is a big jump in the stock markets government has held interest rates at a historic low over the last three or four years I I can't think of a cheaper home loan available in India for the last five years I think now home loans are available at seven percent I mean that's crazy I mean I remember paying a home loan at 12% way back in time I mean so so therefore what has happened is as a result it is no longer remunerative for a person to save their money in fixed deposits because the rates are so low right earlier the fixed deposit rates is to be seven percent seven and a half percent and now they're you know five five and a half percent so that money has gone so you have to take a risk in order to make money right so therefore that means that wealth management both at scale and without scale which means for a limited number of individuals you definitely had some degree of you know wealth managers etc but that's 100 crores plus but people who are let's say between five crores to 50 crores of net worth those will require digitized wealth management platforms and sub five crores which is a large number of you know middle class and young population of that will require to be on platforms to be able to manage their financial health in an appropriate manner now that again cannot be done by you know human beings or person knocking on your door or you going somewhere and sitting in front of a banker and having a detailed conversation and a bank branch is not a place to make a financial decision so this will give rise to you know a wealth tech business as well I feel so sub five crores maybe socially distributed a platform which is definitely but independent financial advisors working on it five to ten crores maybe a combination of low touch as well as you know tech where the clients can do certain things themselves where they don't want to spend time talking to somebody right and they can just easily read reports or make decisions based on something which is sent to them on a dashboard so what you'll need is analytics so that is another area which could come up in the future for sure sure see how I mean don't you think fintech has become really broad based I mean there's so many dimensions to fintech today and I remember it started with a very you know I mean uncomplex wallet when I first heard the term fintech back in I think 2013 or maybe 2012 and today you know the bucket of fintech has become very large so do you feel that fintech itself needs to break itself up into you know different sort of domains in order to get the real VC interest I mean there is insurance as well there's lending and there's micro payments within payments so there's just at all of them are like industries by themselves they are not small play so do you feel that if VCs were to look at all these buckets in totally different sort of sectors or as industries or sectors it would lead to much bigger and funding in much sort of clearer focus from investment perspective yes so I totally agree with you look fintech is a very broad brush and every VC firm has got its own priorities so you know if you organize a fintech forum certainly you see the split into the various segments and they have different panels for different sub topics and sub segments but you're right that you know we need to break this up into different segments and make it clearer at least for the founders to be able to see who they can approach in a VC firm which VC firm is interested in it which is not and maybe even organize events which are very specific to a segment because you can go deep into insurance insurances you know life you know live there is car there is you know health insurance there is different kinds of insurance and there are different levels of insurance for different socioeconomic strata so there is very complex so even lending is very complex there is personal lending there is corporate lending so there is tremendous there is asset based lending non-asset based lending unsecured has many different kind of buckets within that so there is fintech is a very very large space and then of course you must have heard of neobanking I mean we had Robin Hood in the UK Revolute again in the UK there are a couple of attempts based over here but I'm not quite sure we haven't invested in a neobanking we feel that we want to take you know sit back and wait and watch a little bit because we don't know how it'll take off but I've seen a few startups which are attempting neobanking for the millennials for college going or for early salary people essentially everybody's trying to make that layer of UI and UX which is very friendly and you know it ties in better with a millennial so I think when I was growing up it was all about you know banking was a service it was a product and they were all selling products to us and we didn't know what the benefit was so all you know is that the bank was there keeping the money and there was something called a fixed deposit later on somebody told us you know there's something called a mutual fund and of course there was equities and they were loans and that's it but we didn't know anything about principles of allocation between assets we had no idea how to plan for you know cycles of asset turnovers you know when when is there a correct time to move out when is the correct time to move in so you'd be like feeling very good one day and then six months later because you didn't sell you know there was a reaction in the market and you feel that your you know net worth has gone down by 10 15 percent and you didn't do anything on it so there is there is the advisory part the advisory requires data to be housed in a central place which needs to be linked to market driven you know metrics so the effort of putting that data unfortunately unfortunately has to be made very easy and seamless so that the consumer can virtually like you know upload their camps for example report on to a mutual fund platform similarly if there's any way of uploading your equity report on a platform and say that look you know because none of us remember when did we buy a certain stock you know one is a date and what's going to happen and how many bonuses and dividends have gone are not gone to be able to figure out what's the real return from that stock so what you're only seeing is the one simple you know description on the on your trading window which is just saying long term capital gain or no long term capital gain and this is this that's it I mean this is a percentage now you have go ahead to calculate what's the IRR because you've been holding this stock for three years so what's the three year IRR so you do and do it yourself so I think those kind of things the analytics they're very poor at this point of time all of this gives rise to opportunity of different number but you're right fintech has to be really split up and there's a lot of work to be done there's also cyber security every day we hear you know this particular startup large one their data has been compromised so the last thing that you want is you know you're registered across three platforms and two out of the three platforms they're saying that their data has got breached cyber security has to be a very important aspect on the b2b side cyber security on the fintech side I mean you know today I know rbi is shouting virtually on every tv channel about you know be more secure do your funding or do your transactions be more informed about it so I mean do you think we need I mean so cyber risk is anywhere very large whether it comes to your personal data your financial data so do you think every sector in digital needs their own cyber risk startups to be able to manage the I mean security side of things in particularly in the fintech space yeah so this is the biggest fear that consumers have by registering on a on an unknown small you know fintech brand and giving all their data on a platform yes I don't know how consumers do it I definitely find myself a little you know I wait for a reference to happen and there has to be some safeguards over here so cyber security has become extremely important whenever transactions are happening whether it's an e-commerce platform or it's a fintech which is taking in your data to give you a loan or credit card or whatever it might be this is becoming a big business and startups who are working in that space they will do very well I think in the coming years because you know nobody's evolved a protocol and people must do that before they build and scale their businesses and then are held responsible for so much of financial data on the internet because frauds can result you know in India forging and all of that various things can happen people have you know by mistake sort of given out ODPs and found that their accounts were flushed their wallets were now linked to UPIs that introduces a risk as well so sundry phone calls all those things you know so one has to be really very and evolve the structure of how you're interacting with consumers and how you are taking in their documents and what kind of assurance are you giving them about storing of their documents and each time you access a document perhaps you should have a security feature where you take permission from the consumer whether it's from an OTP or otherwise but before I can share it I mean I should be taking a permission your actual formal permission whether you click on a button or you submit something right so I think those things are there they need to they need to come in starting with the very simple stuff and then going on ideas to have deterrence over there in place and things which are very tech oriented so there's no mutual and there's no manual intervention and there is a there is a permission and therefore there is a you know building of mutual trust with the platform because with the bank it was very easy because these were brands and they had branches they had people but um management managers yeah management managers at least you know you can go there and you know maybe you know express your uh uh anger of sickness whatever get a red wrestle over there but what do you do over here I mean you're going to write an email but if your data has been compromised and you've got some money missing in your account or something that's a big risk I mean the whole car we issue that happened um uh told us that you know I was at the receiving end of it in fact uh thank god it was based you know it was not that large but in my end but you know many people just you know that whole thing led to a new wave of regulations on the sebi side on how transactions are being done over telephone or how they how much they're allowed to hold your scripts in their in their what they call as a transfer account or whatever is the escrow account the pool account sorry so I think that these are all these all have happened during this time and these are all warning signs that anything which is manual anything which is uh uh going without your permission uh that is is something to be very off so that kind of level of saviness is is definitely coming in do you see more regulations are coming along the way for fintech industry look we are an over-regulated place so I don't want for regulations to come in there are no there are in fact RBI is releasing sandboxes for experiments which is very encouraging both on the insurance side as well as on the payment side but I think what is what is what is more necessary here is the plugging of loopholes in technology which allow these breaches to happen and certainly on the regulatory side look it's a it's a it's a bit knee-juck so when the karvi issue happened then they introduced these regulations and that became those regulations the sec in the u.s for example is very advanced regulations for insider trading there are lots of you know hoops to cross everybody is very well aware so you know every conversation everything all of that is is subject to that you know risk of litigation all of that and litigation is costly so that keeps everybody honest as well so the stakes have to be high enough but here the the the entire fraud and scope of fraud can be sometimes very small in nature and therefore it goes undetected and unchallenged because you know yeah I mean if somebody loses 25 000 rupees if you know even 20 000 people lose I mean how much of a you know a human cry will they create and how will they organize themselves to address it so it's the that's what that's what does in India the numbers are much higher in terms of number of people yeah yeah I think new new new ways of working and then for new changes that we'll continue to see I mean social media has become so regulated and still more to come so I think virtually every sector out there is going to see some regulations coming along their way you know I've been noticing which sectors have been getting a lot of funding in 2020 and of course edtech became a major funding accumulator I would say and then of course there was gaming and then there was hyperlocal and e-commerce to some extent but fintech got very little funding during this time so do you feel that particularly because the the focus of investors has been less on fintech during the pandemic times one it is going to see any rise are we going to see at least some return back to normalcy on maybe 2019 last quarter or 2020 early first quarter levels as we entered into 2021 yeah so 2017 to 2019 was kind of the golden period for fintech yeah and the first you know first four months post COVID was definitely challenging and sure enough I mean edtech was there was a poster boy and we saw all those brilliant numbers and exits and all of those things so that definitely sparked a lot of entrepreneurs to suddenly start thinking about becoming edtech entrepreneurs because the supply of capital maybe was much easier to get so why try and get into fintech but equally so look now it's is all coming back we've seen the razor pay story became a unicorn we've seen the recent funding of total mint which is a socially distributed you know in short tech platform on the lending side payment side I think we've seen now lending will see as I said it'll totally depend upon the financial strength of the business and what other you know cross-sells can it create can it create as financial services ecosystem and not just be a lending platform because a bare-born lending platform may not cut the ice because there are several competing you know sort of entities in that sense and sure enough you'll have a health of a book but you also want a multiple so if you have sold more things to the consumer than just you know on the asset side then that becomes a much more holistic business and you're serving the full consumer and you you know you're not just waiting for them to take another loan which can be a couple of years down the line so the frequency of transactions is therefore much more than just taking a loan the on the on the other side which is wealth I certainly want I certainly would reckon that there would be a pickup we saw a funding round for grow as well which took place during this time which was in the Mitchell fund space so I think some of the bigger ones have got identified and they've got invested in and they have therefore come into a dominant position and now what we are seeing is a resurgence where we see the coming back and taking a look at what has emerged as as as something that can be more sustainable and has a market leadership status with a good team and a good you know sustainable scalable model that is what will attract attention right now plain vanilla me too stuff unlikely to health is another area which has come up in a big way as well and interestingly what happens is look fintech also is associated fintech right so what we call it is you know for example we invested in a in a in gully network which is a tech-enabled modern network of you know medium-sized kedana stores and these grocery stores they don't get access to formal credit now in the process of doing the business and creating this network certainly becomes a captive base of SMEs on which a lending business can be created right so fintech sometimes is not pure fintech but is associated fintech so you start off with retail but you build a layer of lending on top of it you start off with a layer of lending you can build a layer of insurance on it because you've got the financial details of the consumer you know what the penetration of different financial products normally is in a in a in a in a person's life and whichever is missing you can pitch it to them at the right time you know because they are your customer now you can speak to them so I think the the word you know also fintech the world of fintech has become a bigger and better you know right so even B2B businesses are now creating a layer of on that we saw Bharat pay for example creating that layer the the actual ambition of you know a mobi quick for example which is in the payments business is to create a whole layer of credit instead of developing a whole credit layer uh to SMEs on the basis of the payments that they receive because they get to know the inflows and the outflows of the of the of the SME similarly here you know Bharat pay which is doing the acceptance for merchants is tomorrow able to give working capital much faster than a bank right because you know the guy is busy has had his shop by the time he calls you know or he goes to a bank and says I want to loan of this and puts an application in here and submits documents is going to be like you know 15 20 days so instead of that based on the inflows and outflows the revenue-based financing model has also become extremely popular so all of this requires data so but the data I mean it starts from payments but then it can develop into lending it can start from insurance or lending it can get into insurance so cross-pollination is is very much there so fintech can sometimes originate from mainline businesses amazon for example I would say it's a it's a grand fintech company in India you know it is now helping you pay your bills everywhere they know your entire profile right they by giving you a small cash back what they managed to do is make you pay your telephone bill your insurance bill your broadband bill you know and you know three other four other bills you know that you were paying in any case uh not they put access to your entire profile so they will be able to market several products bring in an assortment of services onto you and lo and behold I saw the other day you know I have an amazon business account you know from some time ago so lo and behold I saw a 30 000 rupee offer of credit in my amazon business account based on my whatever transactions I may have done so this is an excellent example of how a fintech business can be created basis data in India we've had the problem of data so whenever you had whenever you get into a business with that data every business needs credit every business needs financial products from time to time you can definitely create a fintech company out of that no but tell me uh I mean you you talked about uh you know fintech being part of a lot of other companies but can fintech companies also look at creating something uh to the nature of I mean petroleum of course they did they were a wallet and they also went on to do e-commerce um and we've also seen particularly uh phone pay now getting so much into mutual funds and uh you know other sort of instruments that they want to dabble with do you see that uh fintech companies would be extending them extending their space whatever it is that they're doing if they would want to sort of jump into other places where their services may be and you know do it themselves rather than just be a service provider in one sense yeah so um I think fintech companies um they tend to be large the players in the fintech space they are you know they're large they can't be small uh but because you know they they rely on transactions and transactions we do transactions all day and we need that for running our lives so um uh these are by nature they are large billion dollar uh you know uh platforms which are uh transacting with millions of consumers by the time they grow to you know to a respectable level they're already processing uh millions of dollars of transactions so um they are definitely going to create those behemoths so we have you know there are spaces available very clearly where is the mothilal oswal of uh you know wealth management on today's public stock markets there where is the bajaj finance for india 3 uh where is the um you know india voles um you know for uh india 2 and india 3 so these are the um various examples of you know companies that that need to be created visa and master after two decades over here they've managed to convert only 20 of india's transactions uh you know into digital and even they are like kind of now fighting with all the global you know payment players and qr code players and everybody's fighting with everybody and um you know so they're kind of dividing and carving out the pie amongst themselves but you know 70 of india still transacts in cash so that business is left untapped so if you tap that business now that is just phenomenal uh you know there's 800 billion dollars of transactions which are happening in the micropayment space uh which which nobody has any idea who's paying whom and for how much and what frequency and all of them have a certain pattern frequency uh a sense of regularity around them so if one is able to grab the data uh large parts of the economy can become formal and can get converted and can become really big businesses even bigger than banks uh banks in fact have a problem of credit today you know there's the they have they've unutilized funds uh they want to give credit to but the problem is that they they're tired of reaching out and calling the same people that you want to loan uh the guy doesn't want to loan you know so and the people they who who who they can give a loan to they find them very risky because if they don't have the models to underwrite them right because they don't know what um variables are required for underwriting them so that is where fintechs come in and develop those automated underwriting models have low cost of operations uh there's no physical you know frisking of documents and all of that to be done uh scan upload they have you know technology to uh do ocr on these bank statements and make sense out of it because they've got the algorithmic models running at the back uh to to decipher a bank statement and to make sense out of it and see which are the variances and then underwrite a person and then be able to give an output in 24 to 48 hours of the maximum uh with a human you know looking at the net submission by the machine so the machine gets trained and better trained you know based on the outcomes uh and the number of data sets that it has uh and that's the way into the future so these are just large companies waiting to be had and none of the global companies actually have a formula of how to make it happen so if an Indian company does that it can actually be applied in Africa Vietnam uh Indonesia anywhere all of these emerging markets um where similar challenges uh are there right so um yeah so I mean you know that in India there was this big thing and there still is of this chit fund you know people have these committees and chits and various scams also happened um you know but they're not regulated so all of these are informal lending channels right and this is all that people had because they were refused by tier one banks so um tier one banks and you know they have a problem actually they don't know who to give the loan to um the people they gave a loan to they don't need a loan anymore uh so I mean I mean simplistically I'm just exaggerating to drive home the point but basically they were they're dealing with a very small set of people they need to go beyond but they don't have the models uh their branches don't exist there they don't have a technology model so you would don't have physical distribution you don't have tech how are you going to tap that segment you know impossible so that's where fintechs are going yeah that's where fintechs are going and creating those models yeah we'll take some questions also which have come along um so there is uh Shreya who's asking the do you think the lockdown has accelerated digital cashless payments in non-metrocities do you think there's still a gap in terms of people trusting credit cards or are they already writing the digital way so um I think we there has been a combination of a few things one is e-commerce has penetrated much higher during the lockdown period we all are aware of that so the large e-commerce portals they have experienced greater number of transactions from the tier two cities and they have been obviously providing incentives for upfront payments rather than cash and delivery and people have been using therefore their debit cards credit cards or wallets and the easiest method now today that all of India knows I can say with a great degree of confidence is UPI so everyone's today using UPI and UPI has been translated into a QR code thanks to fintechs like bar of pay etc or even pay tm so all you have to do is just open up any payment app of yours which is providing the UPI and if you've got a you know bank account connected to that app all it will do is ask you for that pin code right so you enter the pin and the money gets debited from your account through the UPI app and for knowing the merchant you just scan the merchant code and you know the merchant code comes up so UPI has actually become the largest today payment mechanism and the most I would say newest adopted payment mechanism and especially so in the tier two cities reason for that is also because the penetration of credit cards is lower in the tier two cities tier one cities have multiple credit cards per person and credit card companies have not really expanded their base in a big way because of credit risks so I think there are about 885 crore there must be 85 crore debit cards in India but I think only about 20 million or 2 crore yeah the fraction of that is the credit cards in the country and there is multiple ownership of credit cards so really you're talking about a very a small set of you know consumers who have access to credit cards so therefore India has discovered UPI yes correct and which is in fact directly because of the bank account linkage it's so much easier to use and so much easier so much easier yes and it is reliable it's instant it's like cash right so if you've got a 4g network if you've got a smartphone this is the best way if you don't have a smartphone don't have a 4g network then you have a problem absolutely so there's Neha who's asking that do you think there's going to be consumer wars that are likely to come up with so many payment apps out there and wallets in the market I mean you know I think she's referring to what's happening now for India as well yeah definitely there is a there is a war which is going to happen out there government has capped UPI payment limits to 30% per provider as well I think phone pay was the dominant player over there so there is definitely going to be war out there consumers are going to be spoiled for choice because they're going to be cash back so get ready to enjoy more yeah get more for your money but certainly the entry of WhatsApp will change quite a few things because it will it is quite convenient I think you know there is no doubt that the highest penetrated app in the country is WhatsApp so therefore everybody uses it across socioeconomic classes it is used you know so we find everybody using this particular so one once you have the payment app next to it then obviously since it is the most convenient enjoys your trust you'll rather not link your bank account to multiple payment apps you'd rather link it to one or two maximum and depending on you know the acceptance and WhatsApp should be accepted nearly everywhere so yeah it's already so commonly used so I mean yeah yeah yeah but having said that look the e-commerce providers who are forced to offer these apps earlier so phone pay as we know is flipkart and then there is Amazon with Amazon pay you know and there was you know free charge and that one time with associated snapdeal etc so the some of these wallets they might you know they might prevent the entry of WhatsApp let's see what happens yeah let's see what happens over there so there's yet another question from Dave who's saying that how can how can how can lending lending startups ensure less NPAs in the coming times I think understand so I think look brilliant question the it's very easy to lend there is infinite demand for loans but the difficult part is to get the money back as to say so underwriting is the science over here and being you know eliminating manual decision making in underwriting that I think is what I have learned from some of our investments one has to be ruthless about flaming those rules and then not letting you know manual overrides for the sake of business growth compromise some of those underwriting decisions so when you know that a profile is going to be risky then you know you can't sort of overturn it manually by taking a business call somewhere or the other it is going to hurt you and therefore one has to be a little bit cautious the approval rate for most you know lending companies is is single digits right so out of every 100 applications maybe 3 4 5 percent you know if you're very good maybe 10 percent you know that's very very good right if you have a very well oiled and quality lead generation system or mechanism so yeah so I think the the whole discipline of underwriting that has to be maintained that's the main thing collections etc in India tend to be weak of course there are a number of protocols sending sms's reminders all of that but when a person had decided to default then you know that's then that's really based on how good your underwriting was able to anticipate that and prevent that from happening sure and finally you know I would love to know I mean if if not fintech as an area of investment at all yours what else what other sectors would you be interested in as a fund to invest so we think gaming is definitely an area which has seen an uptick India was I think reported very recently as having the highest number of gaming downloads in the gaming and in this entire covid period so I think we're going from strength to strength well since we can't go to multi classes and you know school is only half day what do you do and so I think everybody's enjoying that second bit is agri so agri is a very big area it's a untapped area the recent farm bills by the government are a progressive move I certainly feel that way of course there's a lot of political heat around it but you know farmers have never been getting their dues in our country there has been lack of investment in cold storage and and the entire supply chain and the reason for that has been that the markets have been constrained to be operating not at the farm level but at the Monday level so farmers are supposed to bring their produce at the Monday level of the apmcs and that's where they're supposed to sell it from there is a concerted group of middlemen who of course facilitate the transactions but operate by their very informal rules and they're all you know sort of the middlemen who supposedly add value but I don't think they add any value other than facilitating a transaction which suffers from an asymmetry of information on supply and pricing and demand right the moment you solve for that asymmetry which you can do with technology consumers can place their orders corporates can place their orders for the next season a farmer knows what to what to plant how much business can they do there is a contract over there no different from any other contract that you would sign electronically today you know including the ones that you sign when you download an app from the play store so all of this can be made very seamless right and escrow accounts can be created you know corporates will be very happy to take long-term positions long-term contracts put quality controls and make the requisitive amounts of you know investments in the infrastructure when they know that a certain amount of supply is captive and is coming in and they've got to store it and then they can make money on it by releasing it into the market based on the demand so there is there is there is the Agri sector which has to be completely reformed you know otherwise it'll just stay very much behind and Agri distress will continue you know and we'll keep paying taxes on one side and we'll keep seeing those taxes being used as loan waivers on the other side we have to make a sustainable financial agricultural model today the only sustainable financial model in agriculture is that of the middleman it's not of the farmer yeah but do you think it's going to drag agriculture down before it sort of puts it up it is always grass food guy at the end of the day and look there is always there is always a pause before you shift gears right whether you're driving a car or whatever so that is bound to happen that is bound to happen but we know that what we've done over the last 50 60 years hasn't really worked where are we today we we aren't getting the freshest of vegetables farmers are in distress there are suicides all of that so you know loan waivers are going out hand over fist and that's all public tax money which could have been utilized to improve the very lot of those farmers but instead of writing off loans we should be creating systems by which they can access the best prices the best agricultural inputs make them more successful and for us as consumers to you know experience better prices because I don't know whether we all know but 30 percent of food is wasted along the chain because of poor logistics and poor infrastructure in the country so all of this can be improved right and it's it's you know it's the middleman who's making the money so non-value adding you know intermediaries have to be removed if a sector has to be transformed from unorganized to organize it as we have seen that happening in so many different areas through startups you know various startups have come in and have done that very successfully e-commerce is a perfect example and given opportunities I mean today so many sellers who are operating on e-commerce websites they have good businesses earlier they had a very few small client base today they are present on an amazon or a flip card they're able to sell to the whole country they're even able to sell to overseas and they don't have to set up warehouses and logistics and you know do all of that marketing etc they get to be placed in a on a search-based mall right so and that is what consumers are excited by because you know that's what they come over there every day they find so many useful things just by using search keywords based on what they wish to buy right so they don't need to spend time traveling through a mall to find what they need to buy they can find everything and that's why it's taken off so it's the same thing which can happen in the agri industry we know that the imports are counterfeited we know that farmers don't have the access to the best farm equipment productivity can be increased advisories can be given out to them tips on how to get the best output what to plant in fact we invested in a farmers a linkedin for farmers called cresci-fi so there is 10 lakh farmers on the platform today the company just finished a pre-series around with a leading investor and farmers are you know giving each other information uploading videos and tomorrow they will be exchanging equipment they can rent equipment rent tractors rent all of this they can get information on the best authentic seeds and fertilizers and everything else and they don't have to go to the one single retail shop outside their gao which is a very which is a very restrictive way of functioning so all of these were you know artificial constraints which were put on the farming economy and they have to be released the investments have to come in but large companies will not invest you know if you're throttling all free market forces so I think some of this we will see so we are certainly you know want to jump into that and then take a bit of better than that education still remains on our radar education is a big area health is a big area so we made some investments in the health space farm easy which is recently you know wrap some good grounds going to be a unicorn just went into a merger with medlife consolidation has taken place now there's 70% of the pharmacy club similarly veto which is into the diabetic you know digital health space we're looking at women's health we're looking at children's health we're looking at you know newer areas geriatric as well so these are all new areas I think which are exciting investment spaces a lot of work to be done absolutely forward to it which are the new unicorns that are going to emerge from your kitty it's always so good and hard thing to see how these startups and the young businesses they grow and become so large so fast and you know when we keep calling them startups but by no means are the startups they're really large businesses so thank you so much Anup for joining us today and talking to us and you know they I mean pandemic or no pandemic we business is on you know we're not lives are not stopping and we're doing new things I would request all our audience to continue asking more questions please join our pages our links are right here on the screen and you know any questions that you have from the investor community or you have some questions around startups we're always happy to answer them from you in fact you know we'll try to push their investors to answer them for you and help you in any way we can thank you once again Anup it's always wonderful to talk to you and next time hopefully off the screen and in person as we thank you for the pleasure always connect with you and thank you for inviting me over and hope this was useful for your audience so I think there's some great ideas you've brought forward and I'm sure we'll see only the results of it in 2021 going ahead thank you thank you very much