How a serial entrepreneur is helping India’s underbanked villages with tech

Good morning!

Techie and serial entrepreneur Satyajeet Limaye believes that imagination is more important than knowledge when it comes to technology, as imagination helps technology become incidental to building an organisation.

Having started his career at a Pune-based manufacturing company, he soon turned to entrepreneurship with Info Dynamic Software Systems (IDSSPL), a software products and projects company aimed at EDI, electronic government compliance's solutions.

In the early 2000s, he got fascinated by mobiles, which were a fairly nascent technology back then.

“I believe that the mobile is going to be in everybody's hand — professionals, students, or domestic workers,” he says.

With this thought and with experience of over two decades, he started building technology backend fintech company BANKIT by travelling around villages to see how transactions took place.

Today, he is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Noida-based BANKIT, where he innovates for the underbanked and unbanked using new technologies, design thinking, and more. Satyajeet claims that 70 percent of the startup’s business comes from its mobile app today.

The Interview

Thanks to the introduction of conversational AI, chatbots and voice assistants are now used by major companies for resolving customer disputes, driving employee engagement, and much more. According to Gartner, by 2025, businesses that embed AI in their customer engagement platforms will further enhance their operational efficiency by 25 percent.

In a conversation with YourStory, Sourabh Gupta, Founder and CEO, Vernacular.ai talks about training their AI assistant to understand 160 dialects to partnering with Axis Bank to launch a multilingual voice bot.

Editor’s Pick: Prime Venture podcast

For growth, all businesses need to keep an eye on their North Star metrics — which are usually revenue, GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or the number of transactions, DAUs (Daily Active Users), MAUs (Monthly Active Users), or such. 

However, Amit Somani, Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, says that for every company, North Star metrics are different. They capture the fundamental value created by businesses. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

Building customisable apps with no upfront cost or developer dependence

Many small businesses often aren’t able to afford and maintain tools like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, etc for their processes. This is why many of them prefer to opt for low-code or no-code methods to build their businesses.

Founded by Hardik P Gandhi, Pushkar Prasad, and Sujoy Chakravarty, Pune-based Zvolv provides an alternative way to build enterprise applications faster, with little to no upfront cost, and no developer dependence. Read more.

News & Updates

• PhonePe — which was expected to complete its acquisition of content discovery platform Indus OS in mid-June — has filed a complaint with SEBI against early-stage venture investment fund VenturEast for “deliberately derailing” the deal and for multiple violations of SEBI’s code of conduct, PhonePe said. 
• Info Edge announced 100 percent acquisition of SaaS-based recruitment management platform Zwayam Digital’s share capital. Through the acquisition, Zwayam hopes to make the most of the experience, ecosystem and resources that Info Edge will bring to the table.

• The government on Friday had made a partial modification of the scheme for FAME India Phase II, including increasing the demand incentive for electric two-wheelers by 50 percent. Electric two-wheeler makers termed this "a phenomenal move" by the government.

• On World Day Against Child Labour, NGO CRY shared that the pandemic has made children more prone to child labour, reversing the efforts of many children-oriented NGOs, and called for immediate collective efforts to tackle it.

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“The idea behind starting BANKIT was to empower the unbanked and underserved segments of the country by providing safe, secure and convenient banking, finance, and payment solutions.”

— Amit Nigam, COO, Executive Director and Co-founder, BANKIT

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