508 When Does a Fintech Become a Bank

Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

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Welcome to Breaking Banks. This week, we asked the question, when does a fintech become a bank? Well, actually, I’m not asking the question. The team at Breaking Banks Asia Pacific is asking the question.

You know, there’s been obviously a lot of fintechs. NewBank has had some amazing results last quarter. I mean, 83 million customers, better NPL ratios than the leading banks in LATAM.

You know, do we still call them a fintech, you know, when they’re performing at that level? So this is really the question that Breaking Banks Asia Pacific set out to answer. And they had the Asian banker founder, Emmanuel Daniel, who was on the show a few weeks ago. They had him join and also Wiser, Surendra, Chaplot.

So let’s see what the answer is to the question, when does a fintech become a bank? Welcome back to Breaking Banks Asia. I’m your host, Rachel Williamson, and we are diving deep into the idea of fintechs becoming what they set out to disrupt, banks. Fintechs buying banks was, quote unquote, the new trend in 2021, as fintechs around the world bought legacy interdigital banks.

But in the last two years, a lot has changed in the global economy. And some at the World Bank are even expecting a lost decade. Although I am old enough to remember similar things said in the aftermath of 2008.

But in Asia, the drivers of growth are still the same. And many fintechs are still, despite those cash shortages, expanding into the realms of banking. Some to the point where they are still buying banks.

So in this episode, we’re asking the question, when does a fintech become a bank? And if they do become what they originally set out to disrupt, is this good or bad or something in between for competition? To kick off this conversation, we have Emmanuel Daniel. He’s an author and the founder of the Asian Banker Financial Services news outlet. Welcome to Breaking Banks, Emmanuel.

It’s great to have you on. You have some strong views about fintechs becoming banks, specifically, you did use the word trap. Can you walk us through why you believe fintechs are being entrapped and becoming the very thing they most want to disrupt? You know, Rachel, in my book, The Great Transition, the Personalization of Finance is here.

I had already started tracking the UK tech players, namely the peer to peer lenders, all of whom started making a beeline to try and apply for a banking license. And I said at that point that the reason the tech vendors were applying for a banking license was that they were sort of throwing in the towel because the so-called tech revolution didn’t take place or didn’t pan out the way it was supposed to. And if you take just the peer to peer players in the UK, they tried to get into the market and match borrower and lender and call their product mortgage.

And when they call their product mortgage, they walked right into all of the same compliance issues, liquidity issues and even technological issues that the traditional banks face. Despite the technology that they were proposing, platforms, data of borrowers and lenders, bringing them together and so on without the balance sheet, all of the technology that was being proposed was trying to end up selling the same products that banks were selling. So regulators then step in and put a lot more restrictions on what the technology players can do around this product called mortgage.

The technology players then decided that, you know what, we better get a banking license ourselves because the issues that we are facing, cost of funds, customer integrity, being able to hive off the assets and sell it to the capital markets and all that only banks can do. And so we need to do the same thing. So they’re walking right into the trap that regulators and the incumbent banking industry has set up for them.

Now, technology is meant to reconfigure the product itself. That is that if you knew a little bit more about your customer who is borrowing for a mortgage, if you knew how long he needed the mortgage for, if you knew how a million customers like him tended to behave so that you could slice your assets into different types of asset portfolios, different tenures and so on, you will start selling a different product altogether. Now, technology is making that… What would that product be, in your opinion? It might be a lease of some kind.

It might be a digital form of a timeshare. You know, it may be an asset where the borrower is able to slice up his loan, not into a chunk of a 30 year bond or a 30 year loan, but into, you know, something that you can pay off in two years, five years, eight years, ten years, and then the rest is a residual of 30 years. And they can also match the lender because different lenders have different risk appetites.

And so, you know, the loan will start looking very different and much more dynamic than it is now. Now, because it’s still the early days of technology in the platform space, we don’t have enough data. We do not have enough profile of customers.

We don’t have enough of the virtual reality type of an approach towards owning of properties, for example. That’s an interesting one, Emmanuel, because we’ve all heard about the rush to grab a banking license in Asia and around the world so that fintechs can start looking like a bank, at least to regulators. I’m interested in this idea of fintechs actually buying banks in Asia.

And this list isn’t exhaustive. You’ve got examples like Gojek buying a stake in digital bank Jago in 2020. There’s Singapore Sea, it bought bank BKE in 2021.

And in 2022, Finacel bought 75 percent of Bank Business Internationale and Grab Car Marketplace Carro and tech giant Bukalapak invested in digital bank Allo. Yeah, that’s just Indonesia. There are similar purchases in China and in other countries in the region.

And there are more than 200 banks out there in Indonesia. So essentially what each of these players are looking for is a license. And what’s common with all of these players is that they’re all platforms.

And it just reinforces what I just told you, which is that these are platforms that want to be able to offer financial services. But because the kind of products that they are trying to issue still traditional banking products, they need a banking license. And secondly, they find out that the balance sheet, they can’t compete with the traditional banks unless they have a balance sheet that enables them to secure deposits in order to be able to lend.

And then there is also payments, which is really the underpinning of all of these platforms. With payments, they reach out to customers. But then from there, the goal is to build assets, both on the liabilities, which is deposits and on the loans.

Yeah, get out of that middleman position. Why do you think some banks are buying legacy institutions though? So, see, deliberately bought into Bank BK with the intention of turning it into a digital bank. And Business International was also a traditional bank.

So why buy a legacy operation with all of those legacy issues that digital banking is supposed to solve, rather than simply going directly for a digital bank, as Gojek did with Jagger? It’s very simply because they are available, because it’s there and because they’re cheap and they’re affordable to these players and they’re a cheaper way to get into the business without having to build a bank themselves. So the idea is to just get the license first. And it’s only in Indonesia and potentially in the Philippines where such licenses are easily available.

The real challenge is that it’s the BCAs and the Dunamons and the large banks that still have market share of deposits and of loans. And that’s what needs to change if the competition in the Indonesian banking industry is to be upheaval. What Grab and Gojek are hoping to be able to do is that, you know, if you take either of them, Grab or Gojek, 140 million customers across 14 different countries and they can connect all of them all at once immediately today.

There is no bank in Southeast Asia that can do that at all. And yet each of these platform players have to go market by market and acquire licenses market by market in order to create the linkages. So they’re creating the, you can call it cross-border connectivity, but they find that what they have to do is to get a license in each market.

And it so happens that Indonesia and the Philippines are the cheapest places to actually buy a bank in the marketplace. And if the market share is just moving around, what will it take to see real disruption? That’s a very good question, because, you know, in the U.S. alone, more than 20,000 banks, you know, if you take down the community level banks and so on. And in Europe, at the provincial level, there are hundreds of banks in Germany and so on.

And in France, because of technology, we should flip the question the other way around. Why can’t everybody be a bank and provide the kind of a network effect where they are dealing with everybody else? The answer today going forward is that how do we network all of the different providers so that there’s a maximum network effect where, you know, technically everyone, every individual is a bank and that any excess liquidity that I have, I put it into the network and it can be borrowed by anyone in the network. And there the risks and the institutions will start looking very, very different.

The institutions will not be holding assets. They’ll be validating transactions instead, you know, things like that. So it’s a very good question, because I think that that’s the question that a lot of regulators and systemic risk people, you know, applying their mind into.

But the way in which technology is taking us in digital finance and the network effect is that we need to start looking at institutions very differently. Yeah, and that brings us into this open banking conversation as well, I guess, where some players have not been very willing to share data. Are you expecting a shift on that front? Remember when when open banking was first launched in the UK, the first year’s prognosis was that customers went back to trusting their banks instead of trusting any of the new payment providers and new players that wanted to get into payments and so on.

So I think that it’s an evolution, which is that at first the incumbent banking industry has an incredible trust. You know, I’ll tell you this, that if you had an election in China today and it’s a fully fair and free election and you had 100 political parties in China today, today, OK, the winner will still be the Communist Party of China. OK, because people trust the party, people, the party has delivered.

It has built infrastructure. It has kept the faith of the people, you know. So in the same way, if you open up all of banking to 100 different players in any country today, people still trust the traditional banks because by and large, they have not lost the trust.

They’ve done certain things that are not right. But but overall, the banking industry still has that trust. Now, the question is, how will that journey evolve as new players come into being? They provide value that cannot be ignored.

And then they build a certain critical mass in their business. Then that trust starts to erode. So that that journey is easily, you know, a 10, 20 year process before which, you know, people start to trust non-banks with their data.

Now, things are happening on the data front, too, which is that data is being encrypted, being provided individual identity and so on. And as as some of the, you know, early explorers in technology start experimenting and then find that, you know, their data has not been corrupted, they will trust more. You know, a lot has happened in the DeFi space, which actually validates that technology is is holding up quite well.

You know, everything that’s happened in the U.S. with FTX and all the tokens and even Bitcoin, you find that none of these technologies have lost the integrity of the transaction itself. In fact, it’s precisely because of the integrity of the transaction that that it was possible for regulators and anyone to follow those transactions. And you want to see that level of integrity in banking as well, that when a bank loses money, that is, you know, you don’t have to go out and gather data and put it up on a balance sheet and then say, oh, you know, you’ve got a 60 billion dollar hole here, but then you can create a 60 billion dollar hole just by tracing the transaction in open source.

You know, so so I think that open banking is still a work in progress. And everyone who’s building specific utilities around open banking, some of them are payments, but some of them are simply identity, you know, and some of them are relationships and so on. So so each of these are chipping away at the incumbents right now.

What would make a large fintech outperform, especially if it seems like just another bank? Isn’t this market still likely to be taken by other players like retailers or other kinds of consumer brands? My advice to any fintech player who’s thinking about applying for a banking license is to start imagining a different banking product, start imagining banking products in a totally different way. Go a little bit further. If you are going to be an efficient deposit player, I can see a world where every bank will compete with each other to issue its own stable coin or stable coin equivalent because with a stable coin, it’s the ultimate form of a digital currency, an ultimate form of a digital digitization of money that is very usable in the digital space.

And all of the elements of interoperability and so on has already been created and exists right now. You know, and when you see how stable coins are evolving today, the only part of it which is unconstructed or hasn’t been structured well is the governance structure, which is that when you issue a stable coin, what guarantee is there that the assets that you have backing the stable coin is sufficient? And when you think about it, it’s banks that are able to answer that question best of all, because they are regulated, because they are transparent in the balance sheet and all that. And they have a governance structure in place.

Hence why the tech companies want to buy them, I suppose. Yeah. And take them there, buy them and take them there step by step.

You know, so what I’m saying to fintech players is imagine a world where deposits have been, the deposit business has been taken over by the stable coin business. It is possible for that to happen. In the same way, imagine a world where mortgage is redefined as something else.

And for the answers that we don’t have right now, it’s coming on stream as the processing speed of data increases over time. And that’s, I think, the challenge that the fintech players have. And that’s what I will use as an argument against any fintech thinking that the only solution is to become a bank.

I’m going to bring you back to 2023. What are you expecting this year in the wake of that capital crunch for fintechs? Because tighter markets sometimes spare real innovation, but it’s pretty clear most banks are just going to be sitting tight and staying the course this year. So what do you expect? What are you hopeful for in 2023? What’s going to be happening in banking is quite clear.

Banking is walking right into a credit crisis, partly because banks will be reticent to, you know, to grow their loan book. And because they’re reticent to grow their loan book, economic growth in general slows down, small businesses become hard pressed for cash, you know, and that creates economic crisis of its own. Then the question is, where is the liquidity going to flow? And some of the answer to that is what entire nation states are going to be doing, what the U.S. will do with the dollar and other forms of currencies that are going to find their way with each other.

In other words, countries are being willing to trade with each other in alternative currencies. I think that all of this actually creates a universe, believe it or not. OK, when you if you were a treasurer of a bank sitting in the Treasury Department and looking at your daily cash flow situation and and your commitments that you have to make, you will be wishing that there is a process by which you can design a protocol by which to keep the bank afloat and on an even keel.

And that kind of a protocol already exists in decentralized finance. It’s working. So so what every treasurer needs today is a realization that there are now technologies to help him hold the whole institution together.

You know, and I think that if if this year there is a banker somewhere, a treasurer somewhere who says that we need to embrace decentralized finance in the way we manage treasury, that to me will be an incredible breakthrough. I’ll be looking forward to that sentence coming out of someone, you know, someone significant in the marketplace. And when it does, it might be delayed by a few months, maybe not this year, maybe in the first half of next year.

But it’s a it’s a recognition that is coming and is coming very soon. Thank you for joining us, Emmanuel. This has been a fascinating discussion.

Thank you, Rachel. You’ve been listening to the Asian Banker founder, Emmanuel Daniel. Coming up, we have Surendra Chaplot from Wise joining us after this short break.

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Learn more at AlloyLabs.com. Alloy Labs, banking unbound. Welcome back to Breaking Banks Asia. I’m your host, Rachel Williamson, and I’d like to welcome Surendra Chaplot, the global head of product for Wise Account and Wise Business, who’s based in Singapore.

He started his career as a producer of Bollywood feature films, and he’s also been a founder and led product teams in India, Indonesia and Singapore. It’s great to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Rachel. It’s great to be here. I’ve heard a lot about this podcast.

Amazing. That’s always lovely to hear. We’ve been talking about the ways in which fintechs become banks or bank-like and then how their original innovative natures seem to disappear.

Wise has fashioned a successful global business, but now you’re venturing into bank territory with several new products. So how does a company like yours stay sharp and flexible when you reach that bank-like level? I think just because we’ve built this company in a sustainable, resilient manner, that’s the only reason we’ve been able to drop our prices consistently over the last 11 years, because as we continue to scale, as more customers use Wise, it becomes cheaper for the next set of customers that join us. Five years ago, if you’d seen Wise, it was a company that helped customers move money across many different currencies and countries.

Today, we help customers hold that money with us in 50-plus countries. We allow customers to receive money like a local, with bank account numbers in 15-plus markets, with other local payment methods as well. We also give customers a way to spend that money like a local with a debit card.

So anywhere you’re going, whether it’s online or offline, you can spend with the Wise debit card, just as you would with a local payment method. And then finally, very recently, we’ve also started giving customers a way to hold that money in different types of assets, be it an index fund for stocks or what we call the interest product in a money market fund that gives you some level of return back while keeping your money extremely safe. And so by building a diverse set of products, all of them fairly sustainable in themselves, has allowed us to kind of see through all these different phases that come and go in the market.

That idea that you have given your customers a way of holding their money in places that will actually give them a return. How are you able to do that without holding a banking license in each jurisdiction that you operate in? So I’d like to answer that question by first breaking down what is a banking license actually, because the bank as a term is like a very, you know, it covers many different things that a bank kind of ends up doing for you. And typically it’s in three big boxes.

So the first one is moving money from point A to point B. A bank does this, WISE does this, specifically across borders. And we hold the necessary licenses that allow us to do this. In different countries, these licenses are of a different flavor, but by and large, everywhere we operate, every place that we operate, we do get that license.

The second thing that a bank does, which is hold your money, we want to do that as well, and specifically for customers and businesses who want to hold their money in multiple different currencies at the same time. We’re not building a domestic only account, we’re building an international account for them. And so different markets, again, have different regulations that allow us to do this.

Like in most markets, it’s called the e-money regulation, and we have that license wherever we hold customer deposits. In some markets, it’s slightly different. Again, in Australia, for example, it’s almost a prudential license that we’ve had to get in order to hold money and then also get access to payment systems.

And again, because it was necessary for us to do that, we ended up doing that there. And the third big thing that a bank does, which is to lend your money and then make money on it, which is the riskier part of this, you know, all of these three parts, this is the most risky when it comes to customer deposits. We have no intention of going in there.

We don’t lend customers money. We safeguard customers’ money 100%. And hence, we don’t need to necessarily go for a full banking license.

Very recently, we’ve started offering the assets product where you’re holding units in a money market fund or an index fund. And in that case as well, the money is always in your name, held with an institution like BlackRock, for instance. If in case anything was to happen to WISE, you will be in complete control of your money at all points in time, like you will have complete access to that money at all points in time.

You are just a facilitator to different banks, different money managers, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t simplify it as that, like what we are again looking for is the safest way that we can keep that money in so that customers have 100% access to that. Again, what we’re trying to solve with all of these things is bring more transparency into all of these different banking services or so-called banking services that our customer needs, right? Like obviously with the interest product, you can earn interest on the money that you’re holding with us, with the stock product, that money is invested in an index fund, it goes up and down, but it’s very transparent to you.

And then also in places where customers just hold cash deposits with us and we make money on it, specifically in Europe, for example, since last year, late last year, when interest rates started growing, we as an institution were making money on the cash that customers were keeping with us and we started paying that money back to customers. Again, in the spirit of the transparency that we’ve always been championing for like we want to be able to give this money back to customers because it’s at the end of the day, it’s returns generated because of your deposits and you should have complete transparency and you should get that back, right? Customers who like you, who like you enough to use your banking or pseudo banking products, that’d be more likely to bank with you. So to what extent does that demand drive additional products that are more highly regulated? What extent does it drive Wiser’s move into a much more regulated area of each market that you’re operating in? I think, again, we are driven by what the customers have asked us before we launched our assets product.

The customers had been asking us that, hey, I am keeping money with you. I need to be able to keep it in a safe enough manner, but at the same time, I would like it if you can generate some returns for me. And then I don’t like the fact that banks take my money and I have no visibility over what is happening with my money.

And we thought, OK, that’s a very important problem to solve for customers because it is their life savings that they’re keeping with banks at times. And we figured out, OK, what’s the regulatory framework that we need to be in so that it allows us to give this product to customers? And in different markets, again, we have to get additional licenses to offer this product. Like, for example, we got a new license in Europe recently.

We’ve had that license in the UK. We now have that license in Singapore. And now we’re kind of trying to get that in different parts of the world as well, because that allows us to solve a customer problem, which is very clear and big enough for us to care about.

So, again, we take this quite carefully and seriously, but if it’s a big enough problem, we don’t want to shy away from taking on the challenge because it comes with an additional burden. In Australia, again, it’s a great example. I think Australia is the only country where we are prudentially regulated.

But then what we saw a couple of years ago, when we started that process, was that this new license would allow us to have access to the payment system in Australia, which is very fundamental and critical. It allows us to connect directly to the NPP, which makes it even cheaper and faster for customers to move money in and out of Australia. And we thought that, OK, we are here to build this company for a really long period of time.

We’re not here for just a few years, right? Which allows us to take these really big, ambitious bets, even though it was an extremely expensive thing for us to go through this process of getting this license. We think really long term when it comes to things like this, that if it solves a fundamental customer problem, then we should be taking on these big challenges. Solving fundamental customer problems seems to be a problem for many banks, doesn’t it? Talking about your move into deposits and money management or asset management, you’re sneaking into an area where traditional banks, they have owned this area.

This is their area. Remittances, moving money around the world have done it grudgingly and very expensively. But now you’re starting to eat their lunch.

So do you see banks catching up to you or looking at you now and going, we need to start acting on something that they’re doing because they are coming for us? There’s a very positive trend with a lot of banks in Asia, and specifically, I’ll give you a few examples of banks in Indonesia, for example. So we recently launched with Bank Mandiri, which is one of the largest banks in Indonesia. And what they did is that they saw that their customers were frustrated and annoyed with expensive, slow FX or foreign exchange or money movement from Indonesia to other parts of the world.

And instead of deciding to rebuild all of it themselves, they decided to partner with Vice Platform. Now, we’ve invested the last decade in building this cross-border payment company and cross-border payment network, which powers all of this money movement. I think it took us less than six months for their customers to now go into the app of Mandiri, click a few buttons and be able to send money anywhere in the world.

And they have access to the same level of speed, same level of price and convenience that all the Vice customers have. In fact, it’s a little bit easier for them because the funds are already there and they just have to click a few buttons and the funds would be moved to the part of the world. And we have now a growing number of partners who are now using Vice to do this.

We have Shinhan Bank in South Korea and this part of the world, a number of different partners. In Australia, we’ve got the Up Bank as well, which uses us. In Europe, we obviously have a little bit better presence with Monzo and 26 and so on.

What we have always been advocating for is that the lack of transparency in money movement around the world is just wrong. You cannot have banks hiding fees in the exchange rate and charging customers like 7, 10 percent and the customers just not knowing. The customers think that, oh, I got a commission free transfer like that just is wrong.

And so if because of what we are doing and because of us becoming a bigger and bigger challenge in this world, if banks also start taking this seriously and saying that, OK, actually, we should bring more transparency to what we do. I think that’s great for everybody because it only brings better services to customers. And at the end of the day, then they will choose which is the which is the brand or which is the company that they can trust a longer term.

And we feel, again, that we have done a good enough job and we continue to do a better and better job at it that customers then can continue to trust us, you know, to do be transparent to them and to charge them the lowest fee possible and give them the best product possible. You said before that you have all the licenses that you need to operate in the countries that you’re in. Would WISE acquire a bank in the region in order to facilitate whatever future products that it needs to do? Or is partnering, as you’re doing now, the ideal way forward? I’ll give you two stories here.

One is, for example, when we operate when we started our operations in Singapore, the license that that allowed us to do money movement had a condition, which was that every customer has to be verified face to face, which means we had to open up an office, put a couple of people there and everybody had to line up and be verified face to face. Obviously, that’s that was never going to scale, but we still went ahead with it and we did it for a specific purpose, which is that, OK, can we get the regulators to see that, hey, actually, here’s the data from Singapore, here’s the data from all the different countries that we are operating in, you know, what you’re trying to prevent here is obviously fraudulent use. And the data seems to suggest that, you know, EKYC is also as good as face to face KYC.

And in fact, it’s better in many ways because you’re able to leverage on a lot of pieces of technology there. And then we slowly worked with the regulator here in order for them to change the regulation. And in fact, we were the first ones to then rely on their digital EKYC system called SingPass here in Singapore and started offering to our customers.

So we try and do this where needed, which is how do we work with the regulator to get the right types of licenses and then also evolve those licenses and those those pieces of regulation because it brings the right kind of benefit to the customer. And the second example I would give you again to repeat myself a little bit, which is Australia, because, again, we saw that connecting directly to NPP was really important for our customers. And then the only way we could do that was by being prudentially regulated.

So our goal is, again, we don’t we don’t necessarily have to be a bank or necessarily have to have a banking license to achieve our mission. What’s important is that how do we keep offering these kinds of services to our customers in the most in the best possible manner? Sometimes the answer would be to work with the regulators and evolve regulations. Sometimes the answer is going to be like, let’s get a much more stringent license like in Australia.

And we are fine and exploring all of those options whenever needed in different markets. Lovely. Well, let’s let’s switch gears a little bit to innovation itself.

In Asia, where do you see the innovation happening? So geographically, I think like almost all of South Asia and Southeast Asia. I mean, India is a great example where they leaped forward to a QR based payment system called UPI. And now it’s like connected the entire country into a very cashless kind of society.

And that is going to happen in many countries around this part of the world. And we are obviously very excited about that. You know, any kind of financial services for businesses is still fundamentally broken in this part of the world.

If you’re lucky enough to open a bank account, it takes weeks, if not days. And I think that’s that’s just not OK. And I advise again, we are trying to change this and specifically for smaller and micro and smaller businesses, because those are the ones that are really, really underserved.

So I think there is a lot that can be done over here on just how easy it can be for a business to start, get started. And then how do you how do you offer a product that can do enough on everything for the small and micro business? And what I mean by that is like, how can you build one account for these businesses so that they don’t have to go to 15 different places to do all of their small tasks? And I’ll give you some examples that, you know, a small business wants to manage all of their employees and kind of give them different kinds of permissions that have given a card to make expenses. They should not have to go to a separate company to do that.

They need some level of reconciliation and statements to see what their cash flow is like. They should not need another company to do that. Our aim there is that how do we make it super convenient and in fact, like help save time for these small businesses, because that’s what they’re most keen on saving, because they just don’t have the people and the resources to manage all of those things.

We were chatting with someone recently who was saying that many of the financial apps must be made for fairly low powered smartphones. How do you build an app with all of that functionality for a phone which is smart but basic? That’s a very fascinating question. Like what we have tried to do and I get this question a lot on like, you know, how do you build a customer experience for all of these different regions that we operate in as well? Because the need is very different.

Any kind of a financial institution, the user experience or the app that you’re using or the website or anything that you’re using has to almost take a backseat, right? It should become as effortless as sending an email. And then the app that you’re using is very simple and easy to use rather than having far too many functionality. That’s what we try to achieve with our apps as well, that customers, any time that they’re dealing with money, I think there’s a lot of, obviously, I won’t say anxiety maybe, but like a lot of care that they would put into it.

And what we’re trying to solve here is that how do we give customers some level of confidence that your money is always safe? One very easy way of doing this, which we’ve found, is that if you just move the money fast enough, like if you click a button and the money is on the other side already, it just removes that doubt and that worry completely, which just makes the job of the app so much simpler. Customers will not be opening the app over and over again to see where their money is. So that’s one way of solving this.

How do you build an effortless kind of a user experience which just takes a backseat? The second way that we’re trying to do this is that by building our products on web as well, like mobile web as well, making it accessible on the simplest of places or the simplest of devices. You can be on a mobile browser. And we recently went through a rebrand, which we launched about a month ago, and we changed a lot of our fonts as well, for example, to make them more accessible, the colors as well, to make them more accessible.

And all of that was done in an attempt to make the website very simple for the majority of our customers. And then because it’s available on web and mobile web in a simple enough manner, people can be anywhere in this world and have access to what they need on their fingertips. They’re not relying on what kind of a device that they’re using.

Surendra, great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining us today. I’m Rachel Williamson, and you’ve been listening to Breaking Bags Asia. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Bags.

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