Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners in conversation with Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

02:00 - "FinTech is a Gift That Keeps on Giving"

07:00 - FLDG, The Regulator & The Regulated

10:00 - How to Partner with Banks

16:00 - Flow based lending & New Opportunities

25:00 - Opportunities in Infrastructure for Banking

30:00 - Co-Creation & Big Opportunities

Read the complete transcript below

Shripati Acharya 00:35

Hello and welcome to Prime Venture Partners Podcast and today we are recording a holiday conversation between my partner Sanjay Swami and myself Shripati on all things FinTech. So it is my pleasure here to host you, Sanjay, on this episode. Welcome.

Sanjay Swamy 00:50

Thank you. And first of all, I guess Happy New Year to you and to all our listeners. New year, new opportunity, new beginnings, and certainly a very exciting time here.

Shripati Acharya 01:00

And in fact, let’s kick it off right there. 2022 was by all measures, a very challenging year for the startup ecosystem and for tech in general. Even in the public markets we saw a lot of carnage. But now 2023 rolls around and our focus today is FinTech. So maybe start off by asking you Sanjay, what are the areas which you are most excited about for entrepreneurs if they are looking to start something in FinTech today? Because FinTech has seen a lot of success already and a lot of innovation already. So I’m curious which are the areas which you are seeing as most exciting?

Sanjay Swamy 01:40

So maybe I’ll step back a little bit also, and my view on this at a macro level is the one line summary is FinTech is this Akshay Patra, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. We’re still always in the first innings of a baseball game or whatever analogy you want to use.

I think what’s really exciting is contrary to the obvious interpretation, is that actually the regulator is now seeing this as a first class citizen and is taking it seriously and is starting to, in the short run there might be some hiccups but really put some proper guardrails around what a FinTech is expected to do and what the regulated parties are intended to do and how does one become a regulated entity if one wanted to play the role of a regulated entity.

So it had sort of gone from the Wild West or the Wilder East or however you want to put it, to now something that is much more straight jacketed and well defined, at least in terms of concept, but still of course with plenty of opportunities.

So with that sort of backdrop, if I think about what’s happening here and where the opportunities lie, because the broad areas everybody will look at are lending, investment, insurance, payments, neo banks, those are broadly the areas.

But a few things that are starting to emerge now I think is across all of these sectors while there will be FinTech opportunities, say for example in lending you have unsecured lending, secured lending opportunities, advanced salary type opportunities, invoice discounting and all of these opportunities, one thing that’s clear is that the incumbents, which are the banks and the NBFCs et cetera, they also need to up their game.

I think the consumer expectation of having a digital first experience, being able to get a loan approved within a matter of three minutes or 30 seconds or what have you. Being able to do a digital video-eKYC and open an account, all that now infrastructure is in place in India especially, and the expectation has also been set.

So on the one hand you’ll have FinTechs who are really more financial service providers who are either getting licenses themselves or partnering with those with licenses and bringing a customer facing solution to the market. On the other hand, you’ll have an opportunity now for infrastructure technology providers who are going to build on top of what the core infrastructure that banks have got but enable the banks or the NBFCs themselves in a much more digital experience to their customers.

And that I think is probably one of the most exciting opportunities of this decade because the banks are here to stay for sure and their infrastructure has to be upgraded. So I would broadly say the same traditional areas, but now there is a new angle of saying I could also be a FinTech that’s enabling an incumbent.

Shripati Acharya 04:30

Understood. So maybe let’s just go one by one to each of the two areas, one on the customer facing side and one on the infrastructure side if I may. So on the customer facing side, where do you think the opportunities would lie?

So on lending itself, there’s a lot of innovation which has already come in terms of making it easier for unsecured loans, for instance, to be secured. We have our own portfolio companies, one of them is Freo, which does that and there are many others. So now how would one think about, what are the keys to success in actually prying open a new area there?

Sanjay Swamy 05:05

So I think there’s no question that we are a credit starved market. No matter what the banks have done or the new FinTechs have done, we are still sort of scratching the tip of, it’s still the tip of the iceberg and the big opportunity is still beneath. So as with all lending plays, especially for a new company starting out, there needs to be some differentiation, which is like a 10x differentiation, which is true for pretty much all new startups, but specifically in this area because this is a heavily regulated space.

So there has to be some either access to customers or underwriting capabilities, some ability to process, some proprietary data that might be organically generated as a part of some other business that gives you the leg up as to why you know are in the better position to underwrite the customer versus somebody who’s just dealing with the same in the public data of credit scores and things like that.

So that I think is very important and I think startups sometimes underestimate the importance of that and try to go in the whole hog and just compete with what an incumbent can do. And I think it’s important for FinTechs to understand what is unique about them, why are they even in this market.

The second aspect of it of course is the differentiated underwriting that they’re able to do. Are they able to analyze the data better? Are they able to get more real time signals from the customers and process that information? And then the third part is also the partnerships that they have. I think the regulator is starting to move more and more away from the concept of FLDG, FLDG being the first loss default guarantee.

Basically the regulator seems to be more strongly now wanting the regulated entity, whether it’s a bank or an NBFC, to have more skin in the game and actually be responsible rather than the FinTech saying I’ll take all the losses, you don’t worry about it, which was sort of in principle allowed in the past.

And I would expect that over a period of time the regulators would want the FinTechs to play less and less a role on the risk underwriting or taking up the risk and let the regulated entities take the risk. So what that means is if the first loss default guarantee is going to go away, then the reason for a bank to work with a FinTech is really either differentiated access, differentiated underwriting, but something that the bank can trust.

And because the bank is taking the responsibility of the losses now, which in the past wasn’t always the case. So that’s something where in the arrangement between the FinTech and the regulated entity, which is the lender, they need to be able to distinguish their capabilities and they need to be able to articulate to that lender that they’re bringing some differentiated capability, which is why the lender will want to work with them.

And then the third thing of course is, as they say, there’s no product market fit in giving out money, collecting it is the real issue. So if there are differentiated ways for the FinTechs to be able to trigger the collections, whether it is as a payroll reduction for a B2C play or whether it is invoice discounting and the repayment or something like that, these are sort of three key things that FinTechs are going to need to establish here.

And these are not things you can buy. So you can’t just say, look, I’ll take all the risk, start working with me. You have to figure out some differentiation for the banks to want to work with you.

Shripati Acharya 08:20

So just to take a step back, FLDG really means first loss default guarantee. Wherein FinTech would be saying, Hey look, I want to lend to this person and the first 10% of the losses I will absorb and then the bank absorbs the rest of the losses, that’s like a 10% FLDG and it could be 10, 20, 30, whatever it is.

And what you’re saying, if I understand is that the regulatory really doesn’t prefer that, which is they would like the underwriting participation by the partner bank versus NBFC saying, okay look if there’s enough of a buffer here in FLDG then I don’t need to bother about it.

Sanjay Swamy 08:55

Yeah. So basically what the regulator is saying also is that we don’t want anybody to get into a bad business. Just because somebody’s willing to backstop it doesn’t make it something you should try out. And one way to do that is because it could go to an absurd level where a FinTech takes a hundred percent FLDG if it’s well capitalized, but that’s not a scalable model at all. And creating a lot of credit with customers who are not repaying is a bad thing for the ecosystem overall.

So the regulator’s point is that we need to have good sound business practices and the only way that will happen is if people that are regulated are actually the ones taking the risk.

Shripati Acharya 09:30

Got it. So what you said, Sanjay here was that you need differentiated distribution access to customers at a cost, I would say, which is better than what the bank would get, differentiation in underwriting, which is assessing the risk and a way in which you can also collect which actually differentiates. And you actually need all three of these to be a worthwhile partner for the bank.

Sanjay Swamy 09:55

You may not need all three, but certainly I would say two of the three would be a minimum. And if you have all three then it’s a very attractive proposition.

Shripati Acharya 10:00

Got it. So now one of the areas where we often hear entrepreneurs where they have less experience and definitely a source of confusion is how to partner with the banks themselves. Because the banks are now thinking about startup A versus startup B versus startup C, and this is actually a core requirement for FinTech to be functional. Without a bank partnership which is both strong and dependable and trusting it’s not going to work. Each FinTech needs that. So what do you think are some of the areas which startups should think about and what makes for a successful partnership?

Sanjay Swamy 10:40

So obviously for a bank, at the end of the day, the regulator is holding the bank accountable. So the level of perceived risk that they would be willing to take is still, if you go to the extreme tech startup ecosystem mindset, it’s still very little. It’s a delta over what they would previously perhaps have taken.

But again, as you said and we discussed earlier, distribution, product innovation and collection efficiency is sort of what will distinguish the FinTech.

So in terms of striking partnerships with banks, I think one of the things here is trust. And the best thing we have seen work is where one of the core team members, if not one of the key founders is an alumni of the banking industry so that way they really understand. With banking from what we have learned over the years of doing probably 15 FinTechs out of 40 companies we funded is you either know it or you don’t, right? It’s not like you can keep learning at the expense of the startup.

And so it’s best to get in, ideally in the founding team if not one of the founders, some good trustworthy person from the banking industry who understands the nuances. So that’s one key thing. The second-

Shripati Acharya 11:50

Basically a banking veteran in the founding team, if not as one of the co-founders.

Sanjay Swamy 11:55

Yes, a veteran or at least eight, 10 years of experience. But someone who can talk credibly and understand. Most FinTech entrepreneurs don’t know that assets means giving out money and liabilities means when you have savings. Logically we all think it’s the other way around.

So you can’t be going and making what is NIM and things like that, net interest margin, these are things that have to be second nature to a founder for them to think. It also builds trust with the regulator, who might come into play at some point in the review. So that’s I think one important thing. And then the other thing of course is the FinTech has to have very strong tech chops and I think for a successful FinTech, the second founder or the co-founder has really got to be an amazing product person.

I think the reason why FinTechs should exist is because they can provide a level of product capability and innovation and a customer experience that the incumbents haven’t been able to over the years. So the combination I think is a fabulous starting point. This is just from the team itself. The second part of course is building product and experiences which take into account kind of all of the expectations of data privacy.

If it’s a payments product in the PCI compliant. All of these things are also very important. Doing most things around penetration testing and SOC2 compliance and things like that. I think many of the banks already were running and at some point in their journey it became important for them to get that. But for startups you got to be there from day zero. There’s no question. You can’t do your first transaction in any payment startup unless you’re PCI certified.

So that is I think a very important piece that you just have to assume, which means that it’ll be slightly longer time to market lead time, but that also tells that other competitors also are going to have that same time to market. So these are things which are best done when it’s a young company and you can maintain that rigor.

And I think the third thing here is that I think it’s important for FinTechs also if they want to have a place for themselves is to not be dependent on one partner. So right from the beginning you have to design it to be where it’s always going to be multi-partnered even though you may launch with one. So I would say those would be two, three of the key things that come to my mind at least. Would love to hear your thoughts because you’ve also been seeing a lot of these.

Shripati Acharya 14:15

Yeah. Actually one of the things which I’ve heard you say Sanjay, is that different banks have different priorities. Which is that, as you say, some banks are interested in building the asset side of their business much more strongly, which is the loan side.

So to that extent, if you are able to create opportunities for lending within the model and the risk framework which the bank has and get that customer in a cost effective fashion, then that becomes a very strong partnership because now you’re strategically aligned with the partner and it becomes a deeper thing.

And in other cases, the bank might be interested in creating a low-cost liability book in which case you’re going and helping them with maybe savings accounts in that case. So I think understanding the signature of the partner bank and what really is strategically important is another key aspect of this partnership. It’s not like you just go to banks, A,B and C and then see who bites.

Sanjay Swamy 15:05

That’s a very nuanced and important point because most FinTech founders will be looking for the first bank that they can get a partnership with, but it’s actually important from a longer term perspective.

And we’ve seen companies regret having made certain partnerships not because they’re bad partnerships, it was just the wrong fit for that particular FinTech. So that’s actually a very important nuance point as well.

One other thing I say is there has to be something unique that you are doing that the bank is not doing by itself. One of the reasons I love these plays which are the intersection of one domain and banking.

Because the bank is going to look at it as a domain play and other domain players are going to look at it as a FinTech play. And that’s why these companies should exist. If you’re just doing what the bank would anyway have wanted to do or thinks it’s doing, then at some point there’ll always be less of an incentive for the bank to support the FinTech because they say we just beef up our capabilities.

So a FinTech bringing some good domain expertise, some ability to underwrite based on non-financial data, these are things that make them complimentary to the bank and therefore additive. And I think that’s very important for FinTechs to consider.

Shripati Acharya 16:10

And I think that again, one of the things which we have talked about in the past is all around how you’re changing the goalposts, about how you’re evaluating the credit worthiness of a customer. Which is this whole advent of flow waste lending with UPI, maybe can touch a little bit more upon that?

Sanjay Swamy 16:25

So before I come to the flow base, I wanted to give an example. We have this company in our portfolio OTO Capital, which does two-wheeler leasing. And in principle you say, well banks lend for two-wheelers, why can’t they do this? But two-wheeler leasing is pretty nuanced because there is a residual value and one needs to be able to predict or to estimate what the residual value of a particular vehicle should be.

And that residual value might change from geography to geography across the country. So a particular form of a motorbike might be much more popular in central India, maybe in tier two towns. So that ability to estimate what it’s going to be worth, the willingness to say, look, in case the customer decides to walk away, I will pick up the vehicle, I will sell it on the secondhand market and get rid of it.

These are not things that banks are comfortable doing, they are not set up to do that. So it made for a very good partnership even though on the surface it seemed like banks have a two-wheeler lending book, why do they need a startup’s help here? So these are some examples of how I think founders should really think about their complementarity add of the value proposition.

Shripati Acharya 17:30

And just to actually expand on that because in this particular case when OTO, as we know has the ability to go and retrieve the vehicle or to sell it, et cetera, the write-offs and NPAs just become smaller. When that happens the ability to lend also increases from the bank’s perspective because now they’re seeing a better return on the investment they can lend more, et cetera.

So it’s totally right in the sense that once you go and specialize in a vertical, a lot of that value chain actually tie back together to create incremental value. Let’s come back to flow-based lending and I think you’ll do a great job of doing it better than me. So why don’t you talk about how that might create new opportunities?

Sanjay Swamy 18:10

Yeah, so traditionally if you see people have been underwritten based on their income, based on their assets that they own, based on if you own a house for example, versus if you’re renting a house, you might be considered to be more creditworthy by a bank because worst case, if he doesn’t pay his credit card bill, I can go repossess his home.

Or at least even if I don’t have a lien on the house, the fact that he owns a house means he’s already been making payments, et cetera. So the probability of somebody defaulting is much lower. But when you get to a segment where they don’t necessarily have all the assets, so I could be a shopkeeper, I might be renting my store, I might not have a vehicle anymore with the rental economy, I’ve got these scooters I can go or you go or whatever, and I don’t even need to own a vehicle and I might be renting my home.

And because I’m a shopkeeper, I don’t have a job per se, I don’t have regular income. It becomes very hard for me to be seen as creditworthy by the traditional ways. However, if somebody gave me money to stock up more goods in my store, there are ample research and studies that show that I would do 20% more business.

And that’s sort of the thesis behind one side of flow based lending. And we have a company of course Finagg that’s doing this. They actually look at the relationship between the retailer and their supplier and they look at the longevity of that relationship where let’s say I have been selling Procter and Gamble or HUL goods for five years in the same store and I’m doing a certain volume of business and it’s a longstanding relationship and I’m fully digitized, I’ve got my purchases and my expenses all sort of digitized here.

That information can be analyzed and the strength of that relationship between the distributor or the brand and the retailer can be analyzed.

And I can say, well how about I give you a loan of say two Lakh rupees or three Lakh rupees so that you can stock more goods in your store or maybe even as small as 50,000 rupees, you can stock more goods in your store. And I can see the uplift in your business and over a period of time as you start repaying it, which will just happen through the course of business, I can increase that credit line from 50,000 rupees to a Lakh, two Lakhs, what have you.

And this is sort of new to the banks because what people are analyzing is the flow of capital, is the flow of expenses and the flow of collections or repayments that are happening. And based on that coming up with the judgment of this person is credit worth for X amount of rupees.

And that had not existed in the past, but it’s probably the single biggest opportunity of not just creating a highly monetizable FinTech but also actually creating massive impact in terms of the growth of the economy as well as income levels for this entire retail segment.

So retail is just one example. Flow-based lending can be used in many other areas, but I think that’s probably the single biggest benefit of digitization. Now what does it require? It requires ability to analyze digital records. It requires very low cost customer acquisition and onboarding and it requires sort of collections which happen in the flow of the transaction. So if I gave, let’s say you were a retailer and I gave you 50,000 rupees and you went and stocked up goods, I ideally want to make sure that the 50,000 I gave you is really a line that you used to stock goods.

It’s not like you can go or take your family for New Year’s Eve dinner. And then subsequently if one of our listeners was to come to your store and pay you for the goods, some percentage of that from every transaction ideally just goes back towards repaying the loan.

And that actually optimizes it for you too because you’re minimizing your IRR rather than waiting for the end of the month to pay. So in retail, actually there are many compelling reasons to do this. One of the very interesting things is retailers, this whole idea of saying repay your loan on the fifth of the month. If you go to a mithai shopkeeper, he may have a lot of business on the weekend. If the fifth of the month is a Thursday, he probably has no money to repay, but on Monday morning he maybe flush with money to repay.

So that doesn’t make him less creditworthy, it just means that the system is just incapable of adapting to what the customer’s requirements are, right? And a lot of it has to do with technology infrastructure that the incumbents have got that needs to be re-jigged or re-engineered. And that’s where the infra opportunity also comes into play.

And a lot of it has to do just with processes and policies and these are new opportunities that are emerging. As you see with UPI for example, the number of digital transactions that are suddenly being recorded, that is the basis of how you can say, okay, if somebody’s doing in the 50,000 rupees a month off digital transactions and we can have a proxy that digital is say 30% of his business volume, if it’s in the metro, maybe a smaller percentage if it’s in a smaller town.

Now we can say, okay, so if that is 30%, that means he’s doing probably two Lakhs a month of business volume and it’s a very creditworthy merchant. So flow-based lending exists in several other areas, obviously B2B things like what Kredx does for invoice discounting, that’s another form of flow-based lending. Then if you think about your consumers, your salaries, what about a salary advance that’s also flow based lending because your flow of money is in your monthly salary and I’m giving you say half your salary on the 15th of the month and gets repaid out of your payroll. So there are a variety of these opportunities and it’s a massive opportunity.

Shripati Acharya 23:45

And it’s probably worth bears mentioning because this opportunity and this data was not available earlier. So UPI was launched back in 2016 and now it’s doing seven billion transactions a month, which is just a massive, massive number.

So just imagine that much data in digital form was just not available. And now we have the framework wherein, with the account aggregator framework now being integrated with banks, where with the user’s consent that data can be made available and so forth. I think that there’s a very clear answer because we like to ask when we are discussing opportunities among ourselves and evaluating companies, why now? Why is this opportunity coming up now? And I think in this case of flow-based lending, that answer is very clear. Why now? Because we just didn’t have that data available so far. And with the deeper penetration-

Sanjay Swamy 24:35

And with GST soon going to be available on account aggregator. It’s not just bank statements, but you’ll also now have the transaction data as well available.

Shripati Acharya 24:45

For businesses.

Sanjay Swamy 24:46

For businesses, correct.

Shripati Acharya 24:48

It’s a great point. And so it’s not just for consumer, but also on B2B side of things where it opens up a whole new portal for opportunity. So flow-based lending really very interesting. So now coming to the second part, which you mentioned earlier of the opportunity set, which is the infrastructure for banking.

So how should one think about both the areas where you think startups could play in that? Because one would think if I were to put on a banking hat, that would be one of the toughest areas to get in because now you’re thinking about upgrading an infrastructure of a bank and the bank would be very cagey about messing with something which is so mission critical to them.

Sanjay Swamy 25:30

Yeah. So that’s obviously a challenge and that’s bound to be there. But I think this decade or what is left of this decade now we’re into ’23, around the world banks are going to be looking to upgrade their infrastructure. Now I think what banks are realizing is they’re actually spending a lot of money on their infrastructure and it’s unlikely that the existing providers…

So historically banks have never built technology, they’ve always purchased technology and they run these huge data centers and they have a CIO who sends out for competitive builds and they buy all these servers and routers and blah, blah, blah.

And at the same time they have a core banking system, but they also have a switch vendor and switch being a software company, software provider, you have card management systems, you have loan management systems, you have all of these. So they have historically been buying technology from others, with huge budgets.

I think what they’re realizing now with the new age companies, which are cloud first, everything built on APIs, everything done on open source stacks and things like that, the cost that these new companies are quoting them is a fraction of what they’re already spending.

And it’s very clear now, a lot of examples have been proven. I would say five years ago it was a no way it’s going to happen sort of a mindset, but I think that ship has kind of sailed. It’s not yet achieved in a critical mass in terms of speed, but I think people have now realized that this is, it’s a matter of time that this is going to happen. It’s not a question of if. We have seen in the Netherlands, for example, the Central Bank is sort of pushing all the banks and saying move your core banking to the cloud.

In fact, naming one of the cloud providers and saying that is the one that you should be working with. So I think banks also realize that it is a matter of time that this transformation has to happen. And I think the big challenge for them is that they are running a business and you’re doing open-heart surgery on my patient or where you’re changing a spare tire while the car is running.

So the question is how do you make that happen seamlessly? And I think what will start happening is the new opportunities which they anyway don’t have is where you’ll start seeing some of this new age infrastructure initially coming in.

And as we have seen with KnightFintech for example, co-lending has been an area where they’re starting to see good momentum. But co-lending is just a special case of lending. In fact, it’s the harder problem to solve it when there is more than one lender, but over a period of time the bank will also adopt it for its own lending. So what I think will start happening is things which are customer facing and maybe new products is where you’ll start seeing some of this innovation come in and gradually it’ll bleed into the whole infrastructure of the bank.

Shripati Acharya 28:10

So just to expand a little bit, Sanjay, you quickly mentioned co-lending. So the opportunity there really is that now co-lending is coming up as an area where banks are increasingly preferring that as a way of lending where they are lending X percentage and a smaller percentage is actually being lent by the FinTech itself rather than the FLDG, which we had a discussion on earlier in the podcast.

Sanjay Swamy 28:30

The FinTech or an NBFC, which has more of the customer relationship and the bank is not just a wholesale provider of the capital, but it’s also available and underwriting the risk along with the NBFC.

Shripati Acharya 28:45

That’s correct. And so the infrastructure and the tech to enable that, because now the repayments have to be split and all those kind of things is not obvious and it’s certainly not already existing. So there are new products, new opportunities which come up. And what you’re saying is that the banks will be a lot more open to partnering in those areas with the new product. It makes total sense.

Sanjay Swamy 29:05

But just to add on that, what will happen in the process as we’ve seen in this particular case is that the tech stack is also just getting upgraded, right? Because the startup is actually using AI, is doing analysis, getting data from multiple sources, automatically analyzing it as a part of the risk. So the banks will start looking at that and say, wait a minute, why am I not doing it for my direct lending also? I think that’s how this will become.

Shripati Acharya 29:30

It gets your foot in the door and then the partnership can really expand over other things as well. So we are looking at opportunities in flow-based lending, new market segments where you can lend profitably through better distribution, underwriting, collections, et cetera, as well as banking infrastructure. I know from some of the blogs which you have written and conversations that we’re also looking at cross-border payments as an area of interest.

But let me change tacks a little bit and ask Sanjay here. So if I’m a startup, I’m a founder and I have an idea and it’s in one of these areas or maybe related areas, how would I engage with Prime here to take this idea forward?

Sanjay Swamy 30:10

So look, we started with FinTech before the term probably existed and it’s been our big part of our heart, and our brain I guess has affinity to FinTech. And quite honestly if you’re a founder with an idea, drop us a note on Twitter or WhatsApp or email or whatever. And we also are very happy to work with founders who may not have an idea.

We have very successfully sort of whether it was Niyo at the beginning or Happay very early, KredX was there very, very early days. EzeTap of course. So we’ve had experience working with a number of founders where we look at the space and we’re happy to roll up our sleeves and just co-create the idea.

Of course, we are always going to be investors on the cap table and it’s their company. In fact, the funny thing with Niyo and they always said this is, the original idea we gave them was what started the company and then we helped put the team also together there. But that idea got abandoned somewhere along the way.

And that’s okay, right? Companies often pivot. So I always feel that, I think when we approach this from a co-creation, from let’s create, let’s see where the big opportunities are, where the big pain point is, where the big profit pools are, where this team is well suited for that particular opportunity, then we can sort of do a lot of work together.

Of course, if they’ve got something going and they’re running and they already have a few customers that’s also still early enough and we’d love to partner, but both models work. So where the founder has an idea, has a space that they’re interested in and they want to brainstorm with us and come and co-create.

So I think specifically in FinTech, given how massive the opportunity is, I think it’s very important to really have open conversations about what can happen now over the next 24 months versus what are some of the longer term opportunities.

And if I’m an entrepreneur, I would say, look, just get started. I think FinTech in India is going to be such a massive space. Don’t wait, do a few iterations, get something going. Be very open-minded about where the opportunities are and how the market will evolve. And I think this is a spectacular time. We’d love to talk to any founders that are interested in the space.

Shripati Acharya 32:25

Wonderful. Thanks Sanjay for a quick whirlwind tour of the world of FinTech and hope to both meet and engage with founders with great ideas in 2023.

Enjoyed the podcast? Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe wherever you are listening to this.

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Primevp_in

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primevp/