 Ladies and gentlemen, let's now get the ball rolling with our first keynote speaker of the day. I'd like to welcome Mr. Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePay. He founded PhonePay Private Limited in 2015 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Before starting PhonePay, he served as Senior Vice President Engineering and Vice President Marketing at Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce platform. He will be speaking on the topic of fast-track financial inclusion in post-pandemic. So ladies and gentlemen, put your virtual claps on and let's welcome Mr. Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePay. A very warm welcome, sir. Thanks, Cathy, and thank you for having me on the virtual screenage show. Super exciting to be talking to marketeers. In my past life before PhonePay, I was heading marketing at Flipkart. It is one of the most amazing functions because even in this sort of hyper analytical data sciences led world, marketeers still storytellers and marketeers still make the world go around. So welcome, everyone, and thank you for hopefully listening to me patiently for the next 10, 15 minutes as I try and share with you sort of our journey thus far at PhonePay and what we are trying to do. And I think, again, more than what we are trying to build, share sort of the vision and how we are going about it and the role that marketing and comm and digital and various channels are playing in that journey. So with your permission, I will just share a few slides that I prepared. And I hope you can see me. Can you see my slide? Okay. Yeah. So I think in keeping with the theme for screenage 2020, I guess the theme was about how to get to the next 500 million Indians. I took a little poetic license and thought I'd talk about building products for a billion Indians. That is sort of the vision statement that we had or I call it the ambition statement when my co-founder and I decided to set up PhonePay. We'd spend quite a few years at Flipkart and seen that rocket ship take off from a very small startup into one of the largest e-commerce companies. And I think we'd seen Flipkart change the way people think of shopping, especially millennials in the digital age. So when we started PhonePay, we were looking at ways in which we could cause a lot of positive disruption, positive impact and really change behavior. And Dr. Batra just talked about how COVID, for example, has just changed behavior forever. We've seen the impact of COVID on our social interactions. We've seen the impact of COVID on how small children think about going to school and education. And I'd like to believe that I think there's a revolution happening where not only are all of us spending much more of our lives on mobile screens, we are also spending a lot of our lives doing more and more things on mobile screens. And a funny little backdrop to sort of how we build the brand. As you can tell by the brand name, the word PE is a bilingual sort of play on words. It's PhonePay phonetically sounds like there's payments involved. But my co-founder and I couldn't agree on whether PhonePay is going to be a payments company or a platform company. And we said, okay, we want to seemingly want to do everything on the phone. So let's just call it on the phone, PhonePay. So that's how PhonePay as a brand was born. And that's why the logo is actually the Hindi pay. We said, we want to build a new experience where a billion Indians should be able to harness the power of the internet and really use their smartphone to change their lives, right? And then we talk about changing lives. We'll talk about them in the next few slides, but when you talk about changing lives positively, you're really, really talking about transformation societally. You're talking about financial inclusion. You're talking about access to products and services that people have never had. I consider myself fortunate. I was in the first generation of people that started using the internet on a desktop. And I think 30 to 40 million Indians were fortunate in that sense that we got introduced to the internet in around the late 90s, early 2000s. So the mobile screen is a form factor change, and it changes the way you have conversations. But those in the marketing industry know that it's not just a change of screen size or form factor. Because you're now accessing the internet or harnessing the power of the internet on the go, the mobility associated with interaction with people has changed the rules of engagement forever, forever. And it's fascinating how that has also meant that you need to think about products very, very differently. Back in the day, people were building one brand and were trying to build one product line or a multi-brand product line in one sector. Today, what we are seeing in the technology world is people are building companies like PhonePay and companies like ATM and Flipkart and Amazon and so many others. We are trying to actually offer many, many, many different experiences in one on an ever-shrinking screen size. So I thought I'd break this sort of presentation down into, or came down into sort of two sections. One, how did we sort of, how did PhonePay get 250 million Indians to adopt digital payments? That's really been what we've been focused on for the first four or five years. And the second part is the harder part of the journey. How do you get the next 250 or 500 million Indians to adopt digital transactions, not just payments? So in the first part of the journey, we were talking to people who had been using 2G or 3G data, had been using desktop, Wi-Fi-based internet services for a while, closer to a decade, maybe two even. And so it was really about getting people to like the user experience and the product that you're offering. But these are not people that are new to internet services. So here the focus first was on really defining a very, very sharp vision statement and focus like product experience focus. So the first thing that we did at PhonePay was we said, we'll take a different approach to how the market has been trying to solve digital payments. One, we're going to build an app which has literally hundreds if not thousands of use cases instead of trying to do and build a banking app or a recharge app or a utility payment app. We're going to build an app where you can do many, many, many different things. The second is unlike net banking apps, which never really captured India's imagination or even worldwide. A net banking app only caters to its own customers, which means that it's very hard to market at a population level. You have to only talk to your customers. CRM is your best friend, but conventional marketing doesn't even make sense. You can't go on IPL and talk to five million consumers and then say this app only works for Punjab National Bank or Canra Banks customers. So we needed to build a solution and a platform that really caters to every single user out there in India. If you want to build a solution for a billion people, it needs to be inclusive. Similarly, while we solve for or we led with UPI as a use case, hundreds of millions of people actually prefer to start their digital journey with wallets. So we integrated not just the phone pay wallet. We actually integrated almost all third party wallets. It was an adult wallet. There was free charge wallet. There was Geo's wallet. We integrated a bunch of third party wallets. We integrated Visa and Mastercard and have about 50 million cards on file. And finally, even with merchants, we said, let's not put yet another QR code or yet another post machine in every merchant shop that only caters to phone based customers. Let's actually deliver an interoperable solution so that for the merchant as well, we are a one stop shop. If they have our QR code there, their customers can use whatever app they prefer. They could use phone pay, or they could use G pay or Amazon pay or PayTM. But really on all three axes, consumers, BFSI industry and pay a merchants. We chose very consciously to go counterculture and go with a very, very open payments ecosystem. Now, this was controversial at multiple levels. Even when you're trying to build a brand, it was controversial because what we said is. We are telling our consumer team, you have to win on the offline payment experience on merit just because phone pays guard millions of merchants. Your app will not get any natural preference. Any app can be used or vice versa. When you make these choices, when you buy into the idea of open ecosystems, every product you build has to win on its own merit. There is nothing that you build that can beat the competition or win the category just because the word phone pays attached to it. So this was the sort of very broad billion person market vision statement we laid out saying. We're going to open up phone pay as a platform to every type of use case to every merchant to every customer. Then obviously the second thing was, okay, what does the brand really stand for? When people think of phone pay, what should they think about? Now here again, our product strategy is very, very closely mirrored how we've extended the brand. When we thought about digital payments in India, the most common use case that money is used for is peer to peer payments in India. Most of us today would be using digital payments quite actively. If you can go back five years in your lives, if you think about how often you were using cash, you're spending money about six to eight times a day at meals, splitting money for lunch with friends, paying a delivery person, buying some momos on the streets, so many different everyday use cases that we felt that to capture India's imagination, the first thing we need to actually solve for is money transfer and peer to peer payments. And in there, I think some serendipity or good fortune, we bet the farm on UPI-based payments because they were allowing us to integrate every bank-to-bank money transfer out of the gate and allowing customers to keep the money in the bank account. We love the idea and we felt that this really democratizes digital payments. So for the first year, we actually allowed money transfer or peer to peer payments only over UPI. Even though PhonePay had a wallet, even though we had millions of people who'd created a wallet account, we actually have never allowed as a brand users to transfer money from one wallet to another wallet account even if they're fully KYC'd. We never actually allowed users to top up their wallet for the first year either. We really put all our eggs in one basket as a brand saying UPI adoption is paramount if we want India to move towards digital payments. So we made the choice for the first year. In the second year, as we'd gotten to about 20-25 million registered users, we felt a little bolder and we started opening up hundreds of spend use cases. So SEND was solved for. It was capturing India's imagination. DEMON had happened. UPI was really exploding. We said, okay, now let's really start making digital payment acceptance at merchants really, really sort of democratic. Now, again, just as recently as four years ago when DEMON had happened, 2016 November, India only had about two million merchants accepting digital payments. Today, PhonePay alone has digitized more than 12-13 million merchants and the industry is standing at close to about 18-20 million merchants. What this means is now on that same smartphone that you're holding and using for all your chat, your news, your content today, education, you can actually spend on pretty much any single merchant use case that you can imagine. During COVID, we actually even digitized BST buses in Bombay. We've digitized airports and patrol pumps. We've digitized every bill payment. School fees can be paid online. You can pay for travel and transportation, all the metro stations, everything. And it's not just PhonePay. There are several players in the category competing, but we're competing in opening up the market, which is very, very attractive, right? And in that sense, we also decided that, hey, we can extend the brand from being a UPI-only app to supporting credit cards and debit cards and all the other networks. So when we entered our spend journey, we really opened up all types of payment methods. And then, of course, now we are in the manage and grow your money phase of PhonePay. So again, first year just going back, vision statement, open up all access, allow everyone to play, allow all consumers to access or make payments to every merchant using any bank account or instrument. Then open up every use case over four or five years. Till here, the brand has been anchored around payments. People today largely know PhonePay as a digital payments app. At the back, back end of all of the applications that we're building out, there's a philosophy. And the philosophy is that from day zero, we were very clear. We want to build highly, highly scalable elastic and intelligent platforms for a billion Indians. Not for a million, not for 10 million, not for 100 million. We want to do every single thing, including handling help queries in an automated fashion. And this, I think, is a learning that we had from our international sort of tech giants that we all are used to or look up to, the Google's, the Facebook's, the Apple's, the Samsung's, the Microsoft's. I think many of us without even realizing it have been using these companies for the better part of 25, 30 years and never actually called up someone. I'd encourage most marketers here to think about or people building brands to think about how many iconic brands have you ever called up? Have you ever really called up Parle to give them feedback on their biscuits or called up Duff to talk about the quality of soap and so on. Most mass market brands rely on the product speaking for itself and those in the digital world rely on chatbots or online solutions for resolving customer issues. And I think this is one area where we started focusing very, very early and I think has been a big factor in phone pick growing really fast in a scalable way. So while we're proud of where we are and then this is just sort of a quick overview of how fast we've grown. So has the industry. Phone pays now one of three players in the digital payments industry, Google Pay and Paydeem being the others that have more than 250 million registered users. Think about that. An industry that is less than five years old really has three players with more than 250 million registered users. How amazing is that? India is the fastest growing digital payments market in the world. Phone pay has over 100 million people, 10 crore users using us every month. They use us on average almost every day 25 times a month per user. We're processing almost a billion transactions every month. All these numbers as surreal as they are are really just representing one thing. These are representing latent demand. I genuinely believe that the first 250 million registered users were waiting for smartphones to arrive with really, really good applications that do more for them. These users have already been using SMS and WhatsApp and chat and Google search and Google Maps for eight to 10 years. The only thing that's really happened in the last three or four years is with the geo effect, data prices have come down, consumption has gone up. People's willingness to try things pose demon and now COVID in the transactional economy has gone up. So we were there at the right time, right place. The really hard problem starts now. How does a brand like PhonePay or any transactional business in India get 500 million Indians to adopt digital payments in the next couple of years? Because the next 250 million people by definition include people in tier two, tier three and beyond who've experienced not just smartphones, but experienced the internet for the first time in their lives only in the last couple of years. These are people who had an aha moment when they got their first geosim and after that Airtel and Vodafone drop prices precipitously. And they have discovered a whole new world in the last two years. They are going to do their first digital transaction, their first bill payment, their first mobile recharge, things that I've been doing for eight or 10 years, many of you have been doing for 10 years. Buying the first, I can't even remember when I bought a movie ticket at the movie theater. Probably 10, 15 years ago, book my show, solve that problem many, many years ago. I can't remember when I didn't order food online and pay for it online. Both happened online. Swiggy and Zomato have changed our lives forever. Flipkart and Amazon have changed our lives forever. But for the next 250 million Indians who are entering the transactional economy, this is their first ever exposure. Which means that now it's not about heavy lifting on technologies, scalable platforms, open ecosystems. Now it's about the very, very basics. Now it's about the software aspects. We need to design even simpler user interfaces. Our marketing team and our visual design team are integrated at PhonePay now because we are realizing by advertising on IPL and advertising in the World Cup and advertising on other events, we can get many, many people to try things. But once they install our app, if they don't understand how to link their bank account, how to create an account, people basically stop using the app very early in the cycle. Once they install the app, again, all rules of engagement have changed today. The next 250 million Indians who are using the internet today don't understand Android design. They don't understand that three lines on the top left of an Android phone, which is something I don't like strangely called the hamburger design, means that you will click there and see a menu. A lot of these people have had somebody, a nephew or a niece or a young millennial, teach them how to use an app, perhaps WhatsApp or perhaps search on Chrome. And they believe this is the only way to use the internet. So now they're being exposed to various different kinds of interactions. To understand those interactions, you need to localize content. You need audio and visual instructions and things that in the past 8 or 10 years, we've been told people will go to YouTube and watch. You need to bring those integrated into your app. People expect more than ever that they will see both hyper personalization as well as global or universal fads on the same 5-in screen at the same time. So while the complexity level is increasing as you go deeper in the market, the need for simple user interactions and visual design codes is higher than ever. More complexity is not a good thing. Dumb things down is the basic primitive that we operate on. The second, and this is an interesting learning for us, the more things change, they say the less things change. And what we are finding, and I think most people are being exposed to, is that the best way to build category awareness and the best way to build brand trust is still with conventional media. I genuinely believe even today, if you want to build brand trust or category awareness, the best place to start is on television and print media. Yes, you can do very, very cute things. Yes, you can get instant ROI or measurability on digital or social or on in-app CRM campaigns. But if you really want to create a category, if you want people to link their bank account and make payments, you've got to go with mass media campaigns. And this was a very counter-intuitive learning for us and especially for me because I started my career in a consumer internet company in the US 20 years ago. I have grown up in the internet world and I think at a basic level, believe that you can build very, very large companies or brands purely online today. Yes, you can. But can you take a product to a billion Indians only online? I believe you still cannot. I think it's going to take time. It's going to take a lot of education in the regular mainstream media channels before you get there. So we've been on IPL three years in a row. We've been, we've been sponsors of the World Cup. We've been sponsored a lot of other events online. Now in year four or five, now that phone pay as a brand is well known. I wouldn't say established, but 250 million people having tried us, 100 million people every month using us actively means that now we're not solving first order marketing problems of brand awareness. Now we are actually solving next this thing, order problems of brand preference and trust. Now to build trust, we are changing how we do things. We are starting to now do surround sound marketing. We are going on social media. We are using digital media. We're using in-app communication. And we are trying to actually educate our customers a lot more about how to use not just the category, but how to use phone pay, how to make sure that you never become a victim of fraud, how to make sure that you understand that phone pay protects you at multiple levels. All of these conversations are happening on multiple media. So on the one hand, again, the next 250 million people I genuinely believe will still come because phone pay is going to where the customers are at on print and radio and on television. But the 500 million people who are using or were using TikTok and are using YouTube and Insta and all the other social networks is where the conversations, the extended conversations are happening. And this has been a major, major realization and strategy shift for us. Is that what works for the first 250 million at the top of the pyramid in India? Those rules just don't work for the next 250. And by the way, they absolutely flat out will not work for the next half a billion people. And that's because the next half a billion are not really even using data on a smartphone today. Right? India's penetration, active penetration of smartphone data enable users about half a billion people, which means starting now in the post COVID world, there are still half a billion adults who've not really ever experienced the Internet or ever use a smartphone and not use them concurrently. So they will be very, very differently. Consumer education as well is going to be way more critical than it used to be. Consumer education and intelligence CRM is going to have huge impact on how brands develop on your retention metrics on your repeat rates on your trust metrics. On the one hand, millennials expect hyper localized hyper localization hyper personalization because they're getting personalized video recommendations on Netflix personalized short videos on social media. They expect the same in the transactional world. People are engaging socially on phones more than they do in person. And sadly, that's got amplified and during COVID again. More people wish each other happy birthday wish each other happy new year or say happy Diwali today digitally in their networks, then they do physically in person. Even post COVID, I believe many of these habits will sustain where network effects will not be based on word of mouth, but based on words you type in. And I think with that I'll stop. I think I think the messages I'd like to leave are to one. I think I think the rules of engagement are changing very, very fast and yet they're not changing at all. The first principle still apply. If you want to build a brand for a very, very large audience, you got to keep it simple. The value proposition should never feel too complex. People have to trust the brand. People need to be able to understand and use your products. Yet at the same time, you can use technology more than ever to do things in a very, very efficient way. So I think I think we are living in the world of paradoxes. Everyone's waiting for COVID to end and yet everyone's loving working from home. So exciting times ahead and that I'll stop. Thank you for having me here, Cathy. Thank you so much. It was wonderful listening to you and yes, you're right. We're living in the world of paradoxes and we're living in a world where mobile marketing is still just evolving. It's just started and it's ever evolving. Consumers are changing. The brands are trying to cope up with the current changes that are happening. But it was wonderful listening to you and listening to the story of PhonePay Till Now. So thank you very much for being here on behalf of entire team of E4M. We thank you so very much. Thank you.