What Daman Soni teaches about privacy-first marketing

There are three main qualities. One is our favorite Indian word, Jugadu. Can you start by giving us an overview on the fintech market in India? Timing for that question is pretty awesome. Just yesterday, you must have read that the Aadhaar usage for e-natch got rolled back. So, when we said a couple of years ago that we are going to go really strong on Digital India, it looks like we are going strong in the reverse gear. Earlier, because of various reasons and rightly so, Aadhaar was not allowed for doing EKYC.

And very recently, Aadhaar is not allowed for e-natch. So, this poses two big problems for fintech companies. One is how do I do an EKYC for a user? I will have to actually go and visit and I will have to take a live video or something like that. And second is if I can't do e-natch, which means I cannot put a standing instruction on a user's bank account to get money back that I have lent to him. So, I have to go physically go and get a check. Now, that increases the cost.

So, right now, I think every fintech company in the country is right now going back to the drawing board and figuring out how do we grow. Right. And how do we become more nimble and faster than the existing institutions. Having said this, in the last one year, I think fintech has made pretty awesome strides. It is the flavor of the season and rightly so because we have disrupted a lot of standardized processes and the industry. But I think it is time for us to take a deep look at how do we want to actually grow this whole industry.

And there has also been a fair bit of confusion in terms of what is happening in some grey areas because of a lot of changes that have happened. So, what can we expect from this space in the year to come? See, India is at the forefront of fintech innovation. Let me tell you how. No other place in the world we have something like a UPI architecture. In America, in the developed economies, there are private companies who are going out and building that. Here, government has mandated something like that. The India stack is pretty awesome.

I think every entrepreneur loves it. Fine, for that to be sustained, I think India needs data privacy laws, much more stronger governance framework so that the data stays in the right location and so on and so forth. Once those come in, I think we will be back in business. But for now, I think there are a lot of experiments that are taking place. There are a lot of petitions that we filed to the government saying that how do we go about doing this. And we are getting swift responses.

Given what you do, how do you kind of work in a country that is many countries in itself. So, how do you actually go to the other parts of India, challenges like language barriers, vernacular, etc. So, what is your perspective and approach to this? So, from day one, the way we have architected our product is that we can plug and play a new language as and when we want. The entire text across all screens gets changed at the click of a button as long as we have the content available. So, we do not have to go in for a new app release.

So, we are architecting the solutions in that particular way. Also, by virtue of working in this market, we kind of have an idea what kind of messaging works across regions. And I think that is very important. I do not want to put broad generalization, but something like color. South India find yellow more appealing because that is a more auspicious color. In North India, red is a more auspicious color. So, the way we have created our brand guidelines is to accommodate various colors for regions also.

I think if you do this early on, it becomes very easy for the user to have recognition of your brand across regions where you go. Yeah. Rather than changing at the spur of the moment and putting it as an afterthought. What are some of the human qualities that you look at when you are hiring? There are three main qualities. One is our favorite Indian word, Jugadu. Because what will happen is something as simple as you start a Google campaign, your Google account will get shut down because the credit card will max out.

Okay, how do I get my Google campaign up and running again? Okay, I am not getting access to one publisher, but how do I get access to him through another ad network? The second is learnability because the thing about start up is we have the liberty to try out new ideas. So, I always keep a learning budget as long as you want to do an experiment for 50,000 rupees on a monthly basis. No questions asked, I am not going to ask you whether you succeeded or failed, but if you failed, you go to tell me what did you learn out of it.

So, this kind of builds a body of knowledge for a new person coming in. We actually give him that PPD saying that these are all the experiments we tried and we failed. So, just do not reinvent the wheel again. Take this learning and build on top of that. And the third is resilience. For us to be able to succeed against the incumbent, we really have to be resilient. And some days you are feeling like we are the top of the world, you got the best product in the market. On the other day, no one is even coming for a single sign up.

So, we have to figure out what went wrong, how can we improve our product. And believe me, we really push our product folks really fast. If you see something in the product which is not evangelizing the value proposition from a marketer's point of view, we go to the product and say, we want this changed within 24 hours. So, we go for a new app release on Google Play Store pretty fast. And typically, other companies, they have a month cycle. So, you see the kind of speed that we have. There is agility kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

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