Looking from Silicon Valley upon the progress that India has made in building a digital infrastructure, I am in awe. The U.S. tech industry fancies itself as the global leader in innovation, yet India has leapt far ahead of it. Silicon Valley’s tech investors hype complex technologies such as Bitcoin and blockchain. But India, with simple and practical innovations and massive grunt work...
Chit Funds are indigenous financial institutions in India. It is a mechanism that combines credit and savings in a single scheme. In a chit fund scheme, a group of individuals come together for a predetermined time period and contribute to a common pool at regular intervals. Every month, up until the end of the tenure of the scheme, the collected pool of money is loaned out internally through a...
At iSPIRT, our belief is that banking will change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50 years. For a variety of reasons, the changes happening in India will follow a path that is very different from other countries. Indian Banks therefore have two choices: Create a new playbook to deal with these changes, or stick to the old rulebook and risk being disrupted. In mid-2015, Nandan...
Last week was a landmark week for all Indians and by sheer coincidence; the country witnessed the launch of two generational shifts. The one that has everyone excited is Jio, a pure, data-only high-speed mobile network. The other that perhaps will have equal transformational impact is its peer in the world of digital payments, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI). As soon as I had my first...
There is today in many countries a proliferation of new digital credit services. These have been especially prominent in mobile money markets in sub Saharan Africa. The poster child has been M-Shwari out of Kenya; though there are a burgeoning array of new varied services in many places. The signals of deep interest from India are strong and India Stack may well position this market for an...
Imagine a warehouse of more than one crore square feet in Central India – around five times the size of the largest football stadium in the world. It would have an eight lane highway that is connected to all four corners of the country on one side. It would have one of India’s largest railway container terminals for handling enormous goods trains on another side. It would have an all-cargo...
Bill Gates met with members of iSPIRT in Bangalore in December to learn about the organization and its volunteers’ efforts to solve India’s hardest problems through the use of technology. Nandan Nilekani played host to the event and also present in the room were Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT co-founder), Nachiket More (former Board member of RBI, now senior advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates...
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...
