Increasing penetration of smartphones, Aadhaar-linked bank accounts and a host of powerful open and programmable capabilities is set to create the ‘WhatsApp moment’ for Indian banking. Once in a while a major disruption or discontinuity happens which has huge consequences. In 2007, the internet and the mobile phone came together in a whole new product called the smartphone. This phone, with its...
IndiaStack can enable the government, the citizens and entrepreneurs to interact with each other through an open digital platform. At a time when financial technology is changing the face of Indian banking, the government is looking to bridge the digital divide. The biggest hurdle here is paper-based authentication and approvals. To bridge this gap iSpirt is working with various government...
Just over 12 years ago, I sat on the sofa outside my office in Infosys, and explained to Tom Friedman about how the playing field was getting levelled through technology. This inspired him to write ‘The World is Flat,’ an international bestseller that sold millions of copies and captured the zeitgeist of the era. It was an era where technology and political change brought everyone closer. The...
India’s digital startups have an analog problem. They face a kagaz ka pahad. Literally. Many of them are designing for the digital desh of Bunty, the 37-yearold Udaipur shoe-seller who gets 40% of his business on his smartphone. Or, Chaitanya Bharti, Guntur’s 30-year-old single-room school teacher who gets remittances on her basic phone. But every time they collect and store paper records...
On Saturday, I was going to attend 3rd year anniversary event of iSPIRT On the way on my bus to meeting, my mind was filled with varied thoughts about 2010 or earlier, when I was outsourced product start-up employee. Looks like little time ago, 6 years has passed from 2010 when I met the volunteers of NPC. Sharing comments to volunteers (Avinash, Rajan, Vijay, Manju, Suresh) on lack of “Made in...
It is time for us to embrace new-age start-ups and local think tanks for India to prosper. Human development indicators improve rapidly when countries learn to provide health, education and financial inclusion more effectively. Incremental increases in expenditure on welfare schemes and subsidies do not bring about this change. Plugging the leakages in government distribution helps, but it is not...
India is the third largest smartphone and mobile internet user market in the world with over 200 million internet users in 2013. The figures are expected to touch a staggering 500 million users by 2017, including 314 million mobile internet users according to a report by IAMAI and KPMG. Clearly, mobile phones are the ‘computing device of choice’ for the country. To keep up the momentum, the...
On 15th October, Mr. U.K. Sinha, honorable chairman of SEBI, had a more than 4 hour meeting with iSPIRT. The goal was to lay the ground-work for a new approach to Paperless and Presence-less Distribution Model enabling a 10X growth in the number of people buying Mutual Funds. The iSPIRT team was chaired by Nandan Nilekani and included key members of its Open API Expert Team – Sanjay Jain...
