Bankers, the frontline warriors in India’s coming fintech revolution
25/06/2018
new delhi: One week you are operating out of your corner office with the coveted view, dressed in a fitted suit, with a secretary whose job it is to make sure you remain as stress-free as possible. The next, you are working in a shared office space, in jeans and a hoodie, trying to make sense of the controlled chaos inside a startup. You have to fetch your own coffee and the printer has run out of ink.
At least six senior bankers have willingly swapped the gilded safety of the former scenario for the uncertain glory of the latter in the last two years. Armed with an intimate understanding of what works and what is broken in traditional banking, they have started ventures to tap India’s vast and underserved market in financial services and technologies.
Part of it is the nature of banking and career trajectories in that sector it’s monotonous and you tend to hit a glass ceiling near the top, and your career can stall for a long time. Part of it is the thrill of doing something meaningful on your own, away from the stodgy world of bosses, approvals, targets and head office politics. Part of it is the size of India’s fintech opportunity. But two things are common to all, irrespective of the reasons they possessed the rare courage to walk away from the safety of a senior banker’s perch, and they understood that thanks to technology, may be for the first time in a century, a two-person start-up could hold its own against a $100 billion bank in a carefully chosen niche.
After chasing targets for the better part of two decades, Manav Jeet quit as the head of retail banking for Yes Bank and started Rubique, a tech platform that provides an assortment of financial products, including loans, credit cards and insurance. “I was a witness to a lot of inefficiencies in the lending process — not only at the customer’s end but also at the financial institution’s end,” he says. Getting a loan was a time-consuming process for customers. For lenders, it meant navigating through a maze of rigid procedures and compliance checks. “The outcome was poor credit growth and delayed credit disbursement.”
For Manish Kumar, who spent nearly two decades across India and the US in banks such as HSBC and Capital One, where he was associate director prior to his departure, it was the urge to do something on his own that made him start his own venture.
He had a sizeable nest egg, but had to face other challenges. “My daughter was born around the same time I started KredX. Managing both my babies was perhaps my life’s biggest challenge,” he says.
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