Evolution of a startup from Telecom to FinTech

1. The Chillr story
Simplifying Money

2. 2003-2007, College of Engineering,
Trivandrum
2nd year - Bored of Electronics! Pocket money selling t-shirts,
fireworks, books, mobile phones
2005: Sold 14k SIMs across 65+ B.Tech colleges in Kerala for
BPL Mobile in 3 months. Zero marketing cost, pure viral,
>10L in profits!
After 3 months of partying figured that building a business is
more ‘scalable’ fun!
Bit by the
entrepreneurial
bug!
$

3. 2006-2011
Co-founded MOBME with Sanjay & Vivek when starting up
was not fashionable.
Raised 250k USD angel investment while in 3rd year of
Engineering.
USSD/SMSC/Voice Solutions, VAS, M-Governance
MOBME
Kerala’s 1st
student startup!
Clients: BPL >> Hutch >> Vodafone; Airtel + Aircel :: Ops in
20+ circles
5 years, 200 people company, 5M USD topline

4. 2006-2011 Witnessed 90M to 900M mobile subscriber growth first hand :: SCALE
What mobile customers want & what they don’t :: UX
Working with large enterprises, governments & regulators :: EXPERIENCE
Income > Expense :: PROFITS
No interoperability, No network effect :: WALLED GARDENS
Everything gets white-labeled :: BRAND
Vendors not treated as partners :: ATTITUDE
The GOOD, the BAD & the Ugly

5. Carrier billing was a bad idea!
Customers had lost trust due to force billing & other unethical practices
Telco wallets weren’t suited for India
We are not Kenya, we have RBI & government won’t let a parallel economy to exist
Regulatory environment is pro-banks
You want to do banking? Get a banking license!
Telcos hate the phrase ‘dumb-pipe’, but!
Multiple telcos agreeing on one model & helping it grow, not happening!
They couldn’t envision beyond wap portals & wallpapers @ Rs 10
Digital money, the pending dream!

6. Rules of the game changed, tables turned!
Voice/SMS revenue impact on telcos
Margin pressure on vendors
WAP portals died, apps bypassed telcos
Network effect & interoperability
App Stores are BIG!
2012 - Smartphones going mainstream

7. 2006-2011
Focused on Banks as alternate source of revenue
Did a bunch of projects for banks around mobile banking
Won them a few awards, learned the basics
Bumped into IMPS, NPCI. Beautiful platform, but no uniform
frontend
Banks had almost written off IMPS due to MMID
Turning
Point

8. We got the idea of Chillr for the 1st time in mid 2013
Took it to NPCI
Send money to anyone in your phonebook without having to
know account number, IFSC code, MMID or even which bank
they bank with.
They said NO, since they are a bank facing organization and
not a consumer facing one
Advised us to do it on our own by partnering with banks
Chillr could have ended up being a software service project if
not for that answer!
NPCI was planning to revamp the IMPS layer to make it ready
for the app world (UPI v0.1)
The million dollar
question!

9. November
2013
Randomly pitched the idea to an Italian bank & they loved the idea
Advised to spin off the product into a separate company
Expressed interest to invest if we could go live with a couple of banks
B2B2C again; then telcos, now banks
Industry veterans
said
No bank will let you create your own brand
They will ask for ‘white-labelled’ solution
Multiple banks on one common 3rd party platform is impossible
You will need approval from RBI

10. Dec’13 - Feb’14
5 people team from within MOBME starts working exclusively
on the idea
Chillar, Chillara, Chillarai & its variants in 7 Indian languages
inspired the name ‘Chillr’
1st
prototype ready in 3 months with SMS backend bounced
off with friendly banks
Quick iterations based on feedback
Eat, Sleep, Code,
Repeat

11. Pitched to half a dozen small banks
Assumed them to be nimbler and more risk taking
Figured that’s not necessarily true
When rubber
meets the road!
Pitched to half a dozen medium to large sized banks
+ve responses in 90% cases, but no definitive yes
Most banks asked for ‘exclusivity’ / ‘white-labeling
Higher focus on digital
Huge brand value & large tech savvy audience

12. USP - Instant fund transfers directly from your bank account, no more loading money into wallets!
HDFC Bank was the 14th to listen to our pitch
Signed agreement in September, launch planned for December
July 2014
Good response from employees and customers
MD’s mail goes out to bigger audience, 40k downloads in under a week
Launch email went out in 1st week of February
Letter from RBI with go-ahead; Registered Backwater
Technologies (P) Ltd
December 2014
Breakthrough

13. From 2 day long on-boarding process to under 5 minutes
Adding use cases: Mobile Recharges, Remittance
Improving experience
Getting the second bank was as tough as getting the first
Fund raising
In hindsight, going live was the easier part
Bank of Baroda came in 2nd
Andhra Bank, CSB, PMC, Bharat, Federal etc came in later
Time to expand operations, MOBME had commitments to other business units too
Got 6M USD term sheet from Sequoia in July 2015 when at 2k txn/day
Raised a total of 7.5M USD with Blume, Uniqorn & Kunal Shah (Founder, Freecharge)

14. The Silk Route to tipping point
Early Adopters: Salaried employees in the 22-35 age group having smartphones
Where: Corporate campuses with good density of partner bank customers
Incentives: Tried everything from Flipkart/Ola/PizzaHut vouchers to cash backs
Failure: Nothing had the pull or the virality we expected
Learning: People wanted instant gratification
What worked: Dairy Milk Silk
100,000+ users activated in just a few months

15. The Silk Route to tipping point

16. The beginning! Now
Rs 1400/user/month
<2 txn/user/month
>80% traffic from major metros
100 Cr worth transactions processed
in all of 2015
20+ sessions/user/month
Rs ~9500/user/month (~7x)
~7 txn/user/month
Multiple hundreds of crores / month
60% customer acquisition via Referral
Dozen plus direct bank partnerships
30+ banks to go live with UPI integration
<50% volume from top 8 cities
4.4 rating on Play Store, ‘Best of 2015’
Recognition by Apple App Store

17. It’s just the tip of the iceberg
By 2020, 350M+ people are likely to experience
Opportunity : Reimagine Banking!
Credit Savings
Mobile
Banking
Insurance Investments
Wealth
Management

18. Data >>
>90% of Chillr
users are
salaried
~40% of them go
below threshold
balance by ~20th
of the month
20th to 23rd - we
observe a small
spike in P2P
transactions
1st week of next
month, almost
same amounts
were going back

19. Pattern >> Opportunity
Informal P2P
interest-free
lending
1
Payback
mostly in <15
days
2
It’s a bridge
loan, with
salary around
the corner
3
Paying a fee is
better than the
awkwardness!
4

20. Ultra short term
Unsecured
Micro loans
100% digital process
Coming soon: Chillr Credit

21. We love BANDRA
Bandra (W) is the most happening place in Mumbai & we got a lovely office
It’s in the midst of all the fun hangout/dine-in/party places, close to airport, middle of
South Mumbai & Malad
But Bandra is expensive, especially apartments
Long commute = High stress, low productivity, less working hours
We started Bandra Allowance for everyone, to stay within 15 min from office
Now for majority of the team members, office is walkable distance!

22. Work hard, party harder!
Options Purchase Scheme for everyone in the team.
Weekly townhalls to update progress & sync up on goals ahead.
Chillr Thursdays - Internal TEDx like talks every week!
Work Culture, Equity, Townhalls et al
Just decide what portion of salary should be in cash & how much in equity

23. Happy team, happy users!

24. Happy users, happy you! :)

25. Core Team
Sony
CEO & Co-founder
Anoop
CTO & co-founder
Galib
CPO & Co-founder
Lishoy
CGO & Co-founder

26. Talk to us!
ceo@chillr.com
www.chillr.com
@sonyjoy @mychillr
@mychillr