[100 Emerging Women Leaders] Meet the women entrepreneurs championing financial inclusion with fintech startup Jify

Anisha Dossa is a strong advocate of financial inclusion. Working as an investment banker and analyst with the likes of Bain and Co, Credit Suisse, etc., she realised that not everyone was aware or had access to financial freedom.

“There exists a vast majority of Indians in the grey-collar, the blue-collar, and the lower white-collar income segment who simply don't have the requisite financial freedom,” says Anisha, who started looking at tech and fintech opportunities in Asia and Southeast Asia to tackle the issue.

In June 2021, along with Co-founder Anusha Ramakrishnan, she incubated Mumbai-based fintech startup Jify.

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Available on Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Jify aims to serve the under-represented segments of the working population, enabling them to have savings or rainy day funds—a need acutely felt during the COVID-19 crisis.

Jify’s journey began by deeply engaging with the grey-collar workforce between the age group of the early 20s and mid-30s.

Anisha explains, “We realised the leakage for short-term liquidity requirements, especially with the younger cohorts, where they were paying 3-4%, sometimes as high as 5-6% per month, simply to cover short-term liquidity requirements between one paycheck to the next.”

“That's how we took the approach of solving the problem of access to their salary on demand at near-zero to free of cost so they can prevent having leakage over there, and eventually, take that leakage and help them move up the ladder and move towards savings,” she adds.

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Jify operates on the B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model and caters to about 50,000 customers.

The startup offers three key services:

Access: Ensuring easy access to earned wages

Spends: Facilitating users with a Jify prepaid card for cash withdrawals, instant payments, rewards, and cashback

Build: To be launched as a platform to engage and educate users on savings, investments at the micro-level, and wealth creation, among others.

With a career in financial services, Co-founder Anusha recalls the time when she worked at a BPO in Bengaluru. “I was, in fact, a recipient of that very low-salary segment,” she says.

“We were sure that we didn't want to be any other lending fintech company; we didn't want to even look at ourselves as lenders. For us, a very powerful part of our product offering is that we are enabling financial access for free,” asserts Anusha.

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Jify’s core product is related to wage access. Employees of its client companies can access their earnings as they accrue to them.

For example, if they've worked for 10 days in a month and are in immediate need of money, whether it is Rs 100, Rs 5,000 or Rs 10,000, they can view their earnings in real-time, punch in the amount they need, and confirm it to receive.

The startup has partnered with corporate brands, where employee payroll is integrated with its payroll software.

Looking forward, Jify aims to own end-to-end management of salary. to better solve the segment on the back of employer security and cooperation.