BharatFi
Naye Bharat ka Neobank - Powered by Setu Account Aggregator
Created on 9th October 2021
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BharatFi
Naye Bharat ka Neobank - Powered by Setu Account Aggregator
The problem BharatFi solves
India has a pool of ~15 million freelance workers staffed across IT, HR and designing, This workforce is growing by ~4 million/annum, where most young millennials also prefer gig contracts. India is likely to have 350 million gig jobs by 2025, presenting a huge opportunity for job seekers to capitalise and adapt to the changing work dynamics. As per a report by ASSOCHAM, India’s gig sector is expected to increase to US$455 billion at a CAGR of 17% by 2024 and has the potential to expand at least 2x the pre-pandemic estimates.
However, there are several challenges to support this gig economy:
- the gig economy is still not fully recognised by our mainstream economy and our governments
- no trusted visibility around their work experience, skill sets and earning / savings / credit history
- extremely difficult to build a consistent user profile / file needed for delivery of financial solutions
- most of data in silos and collection is still paper based adding to systemic delays, unfulfilled demands
BharatFi is a neobank for the growing Indian gig economy purpose built for to provide financial solutions and opportunities and financial inclusion across both the formal and informal sector.
Challenges we ran into
Learning about the Account Aggregator Concept, Setup and APIs was one of the main challenges - The Setu team has done a great job here to simplify this so we could overcome this hurdle. The Postman Collection along with the instructions were a great help.
The next challenge was to understand the challenges and the opportunity in this space and visualize a solution which could actually work. We had some discussions with companies and even small-ticket size loan providers to understand how and what are the issues within the sector and how we could build a solution to remove these pain problems.
e.g. one of the associated challenges is the employment verification of the gig workers - since they dont have a regular employment contract - we had to conceptualize and devise a blockchain based service for employment verification. we used ethereum (testnet) for this.
another challenge was on collecting support information such as identity and KYC credentials and background information. for this we anticipate additional APIs - Aadhaar, PAN, DL verifications, Education Certificates etc which can be done with APIs or with integration with DigiLocker system.
Finally, we had to visualize the final solution which can be useful for conducting banking and financial tasks for the user groups. For this we have used learnings from current digital banking experience and API models to improve the UI-UX of the solution.
Technologies used