Setu’s APIs and software is used by hundreds of businesses from startups to large enterprises to reimagine onboarding, payments, deposits, lending and data empowerment for their end customers. We’re hiring across the board! Check out setu.co/careers.
Hello everyone!👋 I’m Sahil Kini, the CEO, and co-founder at Setu! (https://setu.co/). Let me start with
*What we do*
Setu makes it possible for any app to become a fintech app. We build the infra connecting banks and financial institutions to any third party application.
We do this by unbundling financial products into their fundamental building blocks and offer them as APIs to developers, startups, and enterprises. They can then package these APIs into highly custom apps, tailor-made for their customers.
At Setu, we have four fintech verticals—
💰Payments - https://setu.co/payments/bbps
📈Investments - https://setu.co/investments/fixe...
🔒Data - https://setu.co/data/account-agg...
💳Lending - https://setu.co/lending/devs
We believe that financial technology will be a core part of every company’s offering. And at Setu, we’re building the fintech infrastructure that will accelerate this.
We’re also hiring across the board so do check out open roles at https://setu.co/careers
*Why do we do this?*
India is a poor country. India’s GDP per capita of $1950 is a mere quarter of her BRICS counterparts. India’s middle class of 520 million (hereafter referred to as 🇮🇳 ‘Bharat’) has a per capita income between $600 and $3000. In other words, ~1/10th of humanity lives on less than $8 a day.
One of the large contributing factors the immense underpentration of formal financial services underpenetrated in the country - India’s household debt to GDP ratio is just 11% (compared to 49% for China, and 77% for the US), and insurance penetration is a paltry 3.49% (compared to the global average of 6.28%).
🇮🇳 ‘Bharat’ needs access to affordable financial services to become financially independent. To do that we will have to create new financial products. A vegetable vendor doesn’t need a Rs. 1 Crore home-loan against property. Instead, what they might need is a 1500-rupee daily line of credit with low interest rates to make their purchases and not heavily depend on daily sales.
👝 Bharat needs flexible “sachet-sized” variants of the financial products the rest of us take for granted. They are not interested in the 750ml L’Oréal shampoo bottle with the easy-squeeze actuator, they go for the 3-rupee tear and toss packet instead.
In-order to create small-ticket short-tenure products, India will have to reinvent the way financial products are distributed. And here’s how we see that distribution architecture evolving:
Phase 1 - Branch Banking (1900s - 2010) where customers had to physically go to a bank branch. This distribution mode is most expensive and hence financial services were accessible to only 60 million Indians.
Phase 2 - App/Mobile Banking (2010 - Present) where customers had to digitally go to a bank/Fintech app. This made financial services accessible to about 120 million Indians.
Phase 3 - Embedded Finance/API Banking (The Future) Instead of getting the customers to come to the bank (either physically or digitally), the bank will embed their products contextually into any and every app. This is the only way to reach 500 million Indians.
A huge-shout out to @adityavsc for the hunt! 🥳
Rarely, you find a team that understands Bharat (India) so well and who had already been involved in building/investing in a tech stack for the world's largest democracy even before Setu. Now, they have turned India's complex financial infrastructure into a APIfied platform and democratized finance for more than a billion citizens and thousands of SMEs, while ensuring data privacy. I recently had a developer sharing his Setu hackathon product with me and I was super impressed. Nothing but praise for the team.
Sahil & Nikhil have managed to bring together some of the smartest, super motivated and fun people from across the country in building Setu and the results have started to show. Working and learning with this team has been my highlight from the past couple years and we're super excited to bring simpler and more powerful financial products for everyone 🙌
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Setu is like lego blocks for finance and will solve what Paul Graham calls schlep so that others won't ever need to. All the best 🚀🚀
Setu helps companies test and launch fintech products in a matter of days, not weeks or months!
We work with large financial institutions like IIFL, IDFC First Bank, Mahindra Finance; tech companies like Razorpay, Gupshup, GooglePay, GoKwik; and even government institutions! The best part? We work with them in a bunch of different ways!
As Sahil mentioned in his write up (above), we have four fintech verticals here at Setu—
💰Payments - https://setu.co/payments/bbps
📈Investments - https://setu.co/investments/fixe...
🔒Data - https://setu.co/data/account-agg...
💳Lending - https://setu.co/lending/devs
In payments, we help companies collect recurring payments easily(lower costs are just the bonus). Our flagship product (https://setu.co/payments/bbps) helps onboard companies in popular apps like GooglePay, PhonePe etc so that customers can easily discover and pay them. Thus, saving the trip to your website/app, selecting payment details etc etc.
Investments is one of our most popular arms. We've built a fully-digital fixed deposit product that can be embedded in any website/app. This is a way for companies to start offering FD bookings to their customers, employees, partners etc. All of this inside their own app. We're in the final phase of selecting a few partners; So, do check out this link if this sounds interesting to you— https://setu.co/investments/fixe...
Data : We understand that collecting data is a pain. We also understand that building onboarding flows to collect said data is a pain. We've built APIs (PAN, eSign, Aadhaar OKYC, AA) that anyone can pick and choose from. Companies can build smooth custom onboarding journeys with the best success rates in a matter of days!
Lending : The idea was simple: 15-20 million businesses use Whatsapp monthly to conduct their regular business, why not enable B2B companies to offer basic loans to their customers? Powering the flow is a set of APIs and web applications that can handle KYC, mandate registration and bank account verification.
If you'd like to chat more, please write to me at pete@setu.co.
Thanks for making it this far, here's a cookie:) 🍪
Hey PH Fam,
Fintech space in India is on 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Just read this wonderful news!!
"Google has teamed up with Setu, a fintech specialising in providing APIs to allow its users to book fixed deposits through Google Pay." This is BIG!!
Kudos to the Founders @sahilkini, Nikhil Kumar, and their team for building Setu!
Btw, 'Setu' is a Hindi word that means 'bridge'. Team Setu stands true to its name and aims to accelerate India’s economic growth by making financial services accessible and affordable to all.
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