 Good morning, everyone. Today I'll be talking about the path to innovation and banking. So right before we get started, a quick round of introduction about myself. I'm Manup Shankar. I'm a co-founder and the CTO at Chilla. Chilla, if you don't know, is a multi-bank account-to-account money transfer application. We try to be bank and switch agnostic. And the co-proposition of the app is to let you transfer money to anyone in your contact book by just knowing the mobile number. We launched a couple of years back and... Sorry. Sorry about that. Okay. Is it better now? So we launched a couple of years back and we were one of the first players in the industry for an app like this. Jumping right in, I have structured two segments. We'll first look at innovation in a regulated industry like banking. And I'll follow that up with some pointers on building within those limitations, taking some examples from our own story on how we build Chilla in the initial stages. So innovation in a regulated industry. What is a perspective that something like a bank gives out from the point of view of a startup? You see this gigantic, heavily regulated behemoth with a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape, an institution that is quite slow to move, that is cumbersome, not really adapting fast enough. And as a startup, you begin to wonder whether this is really a place for someone like us with all our nifty, shiny new toys, fancy algorithms, all our agility. In fact, this was one issue that I... This was one question that lingered in my mind when we first thought of getting into banking. But having worked with a dozen or more of India's top banks for the past three to four years, I think this doesn't give the full picture and it's quite an unfair generalization. Banks were early adopters of technology. In fact, net banking was one of the first serious use cases of internet in India. And I strongly believe that that was one of the reasons why India's middle class got online in the first place, especially in the middle of the last decade. Globally, two banks where banking was one of the first sectors to face problems of scale and tackle it well. However, there has been a lot. It seems like other industries have leapfrog banking and are better adopters of technology. They seem to understand this and off late at least, they are more responsive to startups and the fresh perspectives that they bring in. But then again, banking is still a very traditional industry and it has entangled in regulations and is very sensitive to stuff like user privacy, data management, security, etc. And as a startup to innovate in this space, it's a very fine line that you have to thread balancing that innovation and also those sensitive and keeping those sensitivities in mind. So how do you build within those limitations? The best example that I can give you is how we build chiller in early stages, the mistakes that we made, the lessons that we learned and the things that we got right. Like any startup, we started striving to solve a real world problem and this real world problem was something very personal to us. And I'm sure that a lot of you guys would have also faced this. How do you settle money between friends? For example, you go out for lunch, someone in the group pays. Now, how does he recuperate all the expenses that he had? People might forget their wallets intentionally and unintentionally. They may not have changed. A lot of issues, it's always difficult. The next thing you would do is probably lock this down in a piece of paper or evolve that evolved into a spreadsheet and then probably you splitwise to do it. But what happens later? It still lies around there. You just know that you owe somebody 50 bucks but you never end up paying it. The solution was obviously to go digital. But remember, this was three to four years ago. There was no UPI. Yes, digital economy was not that mature. Demonetization was still not trending yet. So obviously we had to compete against cash. And to do that, what it meant was it had to be, our solution had to be like really quick, as convenient as someone taking out money from them and paying someone else. And perhaps more secure and definitely more accountable. So we decided to experiment. The first thought that came across was obviously, how do you identify a person? So the global unique identifier that everyone has is a mobile number. So that was the obvious route to go. And with that set, we had three paths to take. The first was a wallet route. Probably the easiest route to take. But our philosophy was that we wanted a solution to be modeled as much as cash as possible. And wallet really didn't cut it. What we really needed is something where all the participants could settle between their bank accounts. It does very well now, but again, there was no UPI then. And wallet was not something that we tried. Second question, the second option was creating a custom financial switch by ourselves. So being an engineer, this was something that excited me a lot. But the thing is, it's not a problem that three or four of us could sit around a table with our MacBooks and solve overnight. So that got checked. Third, obviously, was to ride on existing infrastructure. And like other people have said, IMPS was already there. It was already three to four years old by that time. It was quite innovative for its time. It had all the right check boxes for us. It was instant. It was based on mobile numbers. It was really secure and was mature enough that 60 to 70 banks are already connected to it. But it had two lagging problems. The first one was that user experience was quite bad. Not a lot of people have even heard of IMPS at that point, apart from people working in the industry. But in the end, this ended up as more of an opportunity rather than a challenge for us. The second problem was a bit more critical. So IMPS being a financial switch, you could only connect to it if you were a bank or you had to partner with a bank. The same story with UPI today. So before I get into how we tackle that problem, this is what we had envisaged Chiller to be at that point in time. This is more or less true even now. How do you transfer money from one person to the other? You tell your bank that you want to transfer X, Y, Z. The bank authenticates you somehow. It passes on that information to the switch. And it's the responsibility of the switch to go to the beneficiary bank, pass on the debit instructions, and finally the beneficiary gets paid. So what role do we play here? So we are encompassing, we are trying to wrap around this whole process and are more concerned with the finer details here. Things like the UI. We need to make the app look how the whole process look beautiful. UX provide a great user experience. And the third was one of our core USPs, number mapping. So at that time, to do a P2P transfer, you needed to know a lot of numbers. Account numbers, IFC codes, MMIDs, whatnot. A lot of cryptic strings. And what we tried to do was hide away all this under the hood, remove all the aggliness, and give the user a very seamless experience. And of course, after that, to engage the user, we needed to provide things, value ads like payments, bill payments, pre-charges, etc. Now coming back to the pain point of integrating with a bank. We did a big mistake. We just jumped into the whole process. We didn't really know what sort of game we were getting into. We didn't know the regulations well. We were not sure of what rules we had to play, what the legality of our whole solution was. And we failed quite miserably convincing the banks. Quickly realized that this was not, it was going to be a huge strain on time and resources. And we had to be really prepared with regulations before we go back to a bank. Now since this was going to take time, what do we do in the meantime? We just couldn't afford being idle. So luckily I am something called a system that could run on SMS, which meant that we didn't need to partner with any bank. So with all the parameters that were not under control out of the equation, we could do something without too much external dependencies. And that's what we went ahead and built. So we built an app on SMS. Obviously this was not a very robust solution and this was not something that we could release out to the public. But it helped our purposes for a closed loop MVP. So we gathered around a network of friends and colleagues and we had around 200 users using our app daily, providing us a stream of very valuable feedback. This I think was one of the best decisions that we took. Because the amount of feedback that we got and very early on was extremely helpful in validating the product one, providing us a lot of clarity on what had to be done and what our product really wanted to be. And by the time we had a chance to sit with the banks again, we knew the questions, the right questions to ask. And more importantly, we knew the right answers to the questions that the banks posed us. This is where we had failed miserably earlier. This also helped us in getting the right integration and we ended up getting one of the biggest banks in India at that point, HDFC Bank. And the whole process helped us ship something quickly and ship something that was useful for the user. So what are the key takeaways from all of this? The first thing I would say is to be resourceful because time may not really be your companion. There will be a lot of corners to cut. You need to cut those corners. Just be aware of what the risk versus benefit ratio is. You also need to have a lot of clarity before you go to banks. Be very clear on your head. Don't think that clarity will come on the go and you will be able to answer everything during a discussion. Be very, very clear. Third is providing value. So this is true in any industry. And value need and financial benefit. You tend to think that especially when you're working with the bank but there are a lot of areas where innovation is possible which may not have any direct financial benefit. Things like customer experience that was probably where we were in or things like improving their processes, cutting costs, etc. Fourth and the most important thing I guess, which most startups don't get right, is not listening to banking or banking professionals as partners. We generally have this arrogant attitude that we know it all and we know our solutions so well. But the truth of the matter is they have been around in the industry for quite some time and they probably know banking way better than you guys do. So it's good to hear out their suggestions, adapt, iterate and build a good product. So before I end, that is this one important point again I had to make. Innovation and banking is not just about cool technology. Yes, cool technology helps but the real innovation is how you implement those technologies that you have and how you work your way around the regulations, the legalities that are involved. Don't build castles in there, be grounded, be aware and I'm pretty sure that you will be able to... something great. And the whole space is still open for a lot of disruption and innovation. Yeah, those are my slides. Take some questions. Thank you Anu. We'll take a few questions. I think we have time for about five minutes for questions. Anybody who has questions or what Anup just spoke about? Yeah, we have a question here. Could you just introduce yourself also please before you ask a question? Hello, my name is Sridham. I work in Rezapay. So I've used Chiller before because PhonePen didn't have an iOS app. So using Chiller, using a phone number, I was able to exchange my... I was able to exchange money with a friend of mine. And with UPI also I can do that. But from a product perspective, how do you plan to leverage UPI in Chiller? Like it said initially, we want to be switchers. So switch here as IMPS or UPI. The method doesn't matter too much. So we are live on UPI now actually. So we run a hybrid model. Some of the transactions go through IMPS, some go through UPI. So it's a win-win for ourselves. The advantage is you don't... So UPI gives us an advantage that... Yeah, any other questions? Hello, I'm Sanjana. So these days even the individual banking apps provide IMPS transfer. So what is the extra value add that I'm getting to use Chiller app? One of the questions that the banks used to ask. The thing is a bank's mobile app needs to do a lot of things. It needs to do everything a bank can do for a consumer, which includes probably even requesting for checkbooks. So it's always this transfer section, the P2P transfer section gets hidden under a lot of menus, a lot of layers. It's very hard to use a mobile banking app just to do that. That's why when almost all the major banks apps, it's quite difficult to actually just send money. And in our case, we just need the mobile number. You don't need anything else. That's the value add that we're getting. Okay. Oh, yeah. Here's a question. Hi, my name is Kunal. I write for economic times. Can you just give some insights of the user base itself for Chiller and how deep has the usage actually gone, given that it's still very nascent in the industry, but still, I mean, any use cases that are, you know, that surprised you also use cases that surprised us. Okay. So one story. So this was very early. So I think probably two months after we launched with STS, just keeping on getting money from every day from 10 to 12 accounts, not every day, every week, I guess, from 10 to 12, same accounts, and it was all small payments. So we didn't, we couldn't figure out because we hadn't promoted this as a merchant app or it was not a merchant. It was some guy using it. It turned out to be a milkman and Pune who was getting paid through Chiller. So that was something that we never, never really realized that at least in the beginning, we thought our target market would be people in the 20 to 30 year old range who just had their salary accounts. So that was our target market. But this was a very interesting story that we had very early, but I can't give you real numbers on. Yeah. I would say around 60 to 65% are still cities, but we do have a market in the rural areas too. Yeah. Sorry. The question or the. The question was, what was the split between urban and rural in our user base? And what I answered was around 60 to 40% that's the split. Could you just hold the mic closer? Yeah. Just repeat that last point. So I'm very bad with Mike. Sorry. So the split was 60 is to 40 urban versus rural. Approximately. Do we have any other questions? I have one last question. If you don't mind. Banking is supposed to be a fairly conservative industry. And I mean, I saw how you had the difficulty in trying to get through. But do you think that mindset should change? Or do you think people developing the app should learn to deal with a conservative industry? Both should change. But mindset is not something that can change overnight and ask be wanting to innovate faster. I think it's easier for us to make some adjustments and work on that. If we don't have any other questions, I think we shall break off here for a tea break. Thank you everyone. Please give a round of applause to Amit.