While the rest of the country quickly adapted to digitalization, rural areas lagged due to various factors such as low awareness, infrastructure costs, thefts, and a lack of adequate commercial bank presence. Implementing fintech has accelerated the growth of the Indian banking and finance sector.
Influencing factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic jolted us to the need to embrace technology and leverage digital payments. Fintech advancements have played a critical role in bridging the need gap in equipping the banking sector and finance organizations, ensuring smoother and faster transactions with increased safety, greater control, and higher customer satisfaction.
Instrumental in empowering finance businesses by enhancing their service potential, Niyogin Fintech Limited has created a promising identity for itself in the NBFC industry. Headquartered in Mumbai, this modern Fintech organization is spearheaded by its MD and CEO, Tashwinder Singh, who is responsible for creating and implementing the vision and mission, leading the development and execution of long-term strategies, and building shareholder value.Â
The Inside Perspective
Niyogin is a technology-driven, a platform-centric company focused on developing a strong financial services infrastructure platform that will allow it to deliver “Banking as a Service” (BaaS) to all distribution and customer-facing enterprises via a partner-led model. In accordance with its partner-led strategy, the company collaborates with local MSMEs and other enterprise partners with a significant and well-established distribution infrastructure. These partners then use the platform to provide their local customers’ with banking, payment, and other financial services via their customer-facing touchpoints. This partner-led model provides cost-effective market access while also lowering customer acquisition costs.
Niyogin’s team offers white-labeled solutions to partners who use its technology in customer-facing touchpoints. Thanks to the platform’s capabilities, these touchpoints are now well-equipped to provide banking, payment, and financial services in their local community.
Niyogin is moving closer to realizing its vision of creating a digital platform that serves as a one-stop shop for all MSMEs’ financial and non-financial needs—built to provide a “Neobank” product stack and become India’s leading BaaS platform in the coming years.
An Exemplary Leadership
Tashwinder, the organization’s leader, has more than 28 years of experience in both strategic and operational leadership roles. He has held senior management positions at Citigroup, KKR, and O3 Capital. Tashwinder has extensive experience in investment banking, deal due diligence, and principal investing asset management for credit opportunities in India. He joined Niyogin in October 2020, and under his leadership, the company has made a significant shift toward scalability. Tashwinder is an accomplished team-builder with a passion for defining and implementing future-driven strategy and growing businesses through entrepreneurial innovation and a customer-centric approach. He has demonstrated abilities at all levels of organizational management to build and manage the “scale of business” that is the primary focus of Niyogin’s platforms in business services, wealth, and payments.
The Business Accelerator
While several factors distinguish Niyogin from its competitors, Tashwinder highlighted the two most important ones. The first is the problem the company is attempting to solve, and the second is its open tech platform-driven strategy.
Niyogin uses a customer-centric strategy to empower 800 million rural Indians and all underserved MSMEs. Because of this target consumer demographic, it has provided widespread financial inclusion. Its product propositions include financial services, such as access to banking services, and may expand to other non-financial services product areas due to the customer-centric approach.
The use of an open tech platform is the second distinguishing feature. This enables the team to successfully build a full-stack, API- and SDK-ready (Software Development Kit) financial services infrastructure that partners can use with various needs.
Boosting Tech Momentum
The government has recently launched a series of initiatives to promote financial inclusion. The India Stack, a free and open collection of APIs that enables presence-free, paperless, and cashless distribution, is one of these. In addition, the government launched the Jan Dhan-Aadhar-Mobile (JAM) trinity to connect banking infrastructure with government initiatives and provide financial inclusion via digital methods. This increased the government’s use of electronic payments for public welfare schemes and provided the most significant Launchpad for Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT). This facilitated online interoperable financial transactions via the Aadhar Enabled Payment System.
The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an open e-commerce protocol network, was recently launched by the government. The network’s goal is to serve online commerce to buyers, sellers (mostly MSMEs), and logistics professionals who are not currently involved in India’s e-commerce revolution. Such initiatives are expected to increase financial inclusion.
Niyogin envisions itself as an Application Program Interface (API) infrastructure company with an NBFC license that operates on a partner-led, cost-effective business model. As a result, it approaches the same problem differently and is product and device agnostic.
Niyogin already offers a wide range of financial products on its platform and plans to expand those offerings in the coming months. This is part of its Hypergrowth strategy, and by offering these products and services, it expects to gain significant reach and scale.
Opportunities Within
These recent Government initiatives created a new financial inclusion opportunity. It is expected that the Aadhar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) volumes will substantially increase the market size from 4.3 billion transactions in FY22 to 11.0 billion transactions by FY2025*.Â
Niyogin’s Hypergrowth strategy is designed to tap this large opportunity significantly. It expects its GTV (Gross Transactional Value) to grow more than eleven times over the next three years, from over ₹9000 crores in FY 2022 to over ₹1 lakh crores in FY 2025. Niyogin’s goal is to increase the number of BC agents or touch points by around six times, from close to 379,000 at the end of the previous quarter to roughly 1.5–2 million. Niyogin expects this will enable it to become a ₹500 crores revenue company by FY2025 and deliver an EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation) of 10%–12%.
Advancing through Collaborations
For the next three years, Niyogin to focus on three main areas—expanding its current alliances, growing its presence by bringing on new partners, and expanding the product offerings to provide the MSMEs with a one-stop-shop. Tashwinder said, “We expect the current year to be a year of build. We are focusing our energies on implementing product propositions and executing our current existing partnerships. We will be trying to build, launch and then continue to build on the side. Simultaneously, we are focused on developing our Intellectual Property, which will help us grow in the coming years.”
