today I’m gonna be talking to you about
why platforms are important in our lives
these are some of the names that you
would have seen platforms that we use
all economic leverage around the world
has moved the words building platforms
so the most valuable companies in the
world with a market cap of over five
trillion dollars are all platforms today
which enable people to communicate small
businesses to interact with consumers
and so on so it’s becoming increasingly
important that we use platforms for
building commercial value and today my
story is about talking to you is or on
how do we use platforms to build or
bring about societal change this journey
started to me in 2016 February just like
any other bangalore ian boy i am also an
engineer i was expected to go to us to
do my masters decided to stay back and
then i came i stumbled upon this
intersection of policy platforms and
products i joined i spirit as a fellow
and took up the responsibility to build
the ecosystem for unified payments
interface along with npc i not too far
away from here at dodge we launched UPI
as a protocol as as a technology launch
wherein we had over 330 developers and
around 30 bankers in the room so UPI was
conceived to be a api LED payments
platform and this journey has helped me
believe that today we can solve a lot of
hard problems by building societal
platforms it opened up to me to say that
for for a long time we thought about
solving social problems through policy
now how about we start looking about
policy in the eyes of a platform to go
back to give you context in 2016
india had issued over 600 million plus
debit cards with over 1 billion people
enrolled in other the jonathan program
was a huge success and millions of
Indians got access to bank accounts even
before they got access to actual toilets
however we still had this issue that in
spite of having so many people under the
banking system the Digital payment
adoption was actually less than five
percent and this was largely due to
fragmented payment systems and
cumbersome user experiences many
a few would have experienced going back
to your banks signing up a long form to
enable your mobile banking and so on to
get started so this had led to this
fragmentation of various different
payment systems to be built in India and
and we didn’t have meaningful adoption
both from merchants and consumers so to
solve for this
the RBI came up with a vision policy and
along with NPC I envisioned UPI to
become a public payments platform and
the goal of UPI was very simple to do
one thing well which is solve for money
movement between two accounts and it was
by design designed to basically be a
public payment system which would not
profit but would allow people to create
value on top of it and UPI was actually
designed as a a payments markup language
which would allow payment transfer
between bank accounts it will allow
payments transfer between wallets and so
on and so forth enabling a host of use
cases for p2p payments p2m payments and
so on and so forth however what this
cost was cognitive dissonance two people
who are already in the industry because
the bankers were always the bankers
always thought about building payment
systems as to a revenue stream a stream
through which they could make money so
this was causing dissonance on how do I
now start thinking about a public
payments platform so it really didn’t
have any much backers till November 2016
Wendy monetization happen so d monetize
Wendy monetization happened due to the
cash crunch policymakers regulators
bankers entrepreneurs everybody came
together to realize that hey look we
have this platform which has already
been built now how do we leverage this
so this provided as a policy window to
basically align a wide variety of
stakeholders onto a single platform and
focus however we still had a challenge
upî by design allowed people to create
multiple payment apps so by the time in
november we actually had 20-plus apps
which were launched by different banks
however the government couldn’t figure
out which apps should I promote so they
came up with this idea to say how about
we build a common app which will
basically showcase the value of the
platform which will rally
all the banks together and thus beam was
born into December 2016 it was a
three-week effort which I had the
fortunate to lead the team to build and
this actually showcase that in three
weeks you could actually now design an
app ground up for India based on a
platform and launch it at scale so we
built an Android app we built an iOS app
also overnight we replaced the start9 9
– protocol which is basically the ussd
protocol that allows money transfer to
happen between feature phones so within
these three weeks we built and took this
app to Delhi all the policymakers loved
it and the PM put his weight behind it
and then beam became the fastest
downloaded app ever in Indian Play Store
history it reached 10 million downloads
in the first 10 days and what we did
with Beam was we used it to basically
bring a lot of people onto the platform
use the data that we generated from beam
to basically improve our success rates
so that there is more confidence in the
platform so that we could invite more of
the stakeholders to come and build on
top of it and by the end we now had a
wide variety of players a mix of both
Indian entrepreneurs and global
entrepreneurs and suddenly India became
the fastest or the largest playground
for people to build on top and what is
important to note is that we ended up
creating an open architecture which
allowed multiple apps and multiple
innovators to build around the same
rails without allowing people to build
islands of payment platforms examples of
this is in China where there are only
two apps which basically control 90% of
the market share
however in India today we have a vibrant
ecosystem of various different people
solving for consumer payment solving for
merchant payments solving for government
to consumer payments and so on and so
forth and most importantly it allowed a
layer of innovation which allowed people
to now build payment experiences using
audio QR people built now our payment
experiences using low-cost Bluetooth
devices and so on and so forth so today
18 months later UPI is the fastest
growing payments platform it did 246
million
transactions in the last month just to
put this into perspective it took nine
years for I MPs to reach this kind of
scale and we did this in 18 months and
it also processed around 40,000 crores
and it’s growing at a rapid speed morgan
stanley estimates that UPI will
contribute or will process 450 billion
dollars in the next five years and it
will basically aid a number of use cases
like payments it’ll enable micro
insurance it’ll enable lending and it’ll
enable formal savings across various
different ecosystem players who are
building on top of this so what was a
big learning out of this the big
learning out of this was that we need to
build societal platforms and these
societal platforms by design need to be
public goods and then they’re asked we
need to allow combinatorial innovation
and value creation on top of them unlike
existing platforms which I spoke about
in the earlier slides so we need in
India we’ve basically applied this
learning into various different sectors
today
ayushman bharat which is the most
ambitious healthcare program in in the
world which is expected to cover 500
million Indians under a health universal
health insurance program is now being
built on a foundation of what is called
as the National Health stack which is
basically a foundation of various
different artifacts which allow people
to come together and solve similarly we
are approaching this to solve for micro
insurance for farmers where we’re trying
to build what is called as drone stack
which will enable a drone a pilot to
apply for a licence to get a license and
fly a drone in real time create a
trusted data source and provide a micro
insurance product for a consumer
similarly we’ve also applied this in
travel we’re looking at the same it with
credit with RBI trying to build what is
called as the public credit registry we
were also building what is called as
data fiduciaries which are basically
these entities which are designed not to
make any money on top of your data but
only to empower you to get your data
from various different data sources so
if you’re a policymaker or a regulator
or anybody who’s working in any of these
segments a question that you should ask
yourself is like how do you leverage
power of these platforms to build
various different people together to
solve some of the hard problems and
here’s a frame-up for you to think about
how to build societal platforms every
hard problem that we think about in the
world is actually really hard right you
cannot solve this problem in in totality
so the first step for you to do is to
basically break down the problem and
unbundle the problem so if you talk
about Financial Inclusion in India
Financial Inclusion in India required
multiple things to happen the first
thing is that we had to give an identity
to every Indian so that’s where Arthur
was conceived and the second step after
universal banking coverage was to
basically build this low-cost payments
layer and that’s how of UPI was
conceived so once you have unbundled
your problems in two different sectors
then you basically find an operating
agency who can solve this problem really
well and just do that one thing in the
case of UPI
it was the national payments Corporation
of India which is tasked with the to
build UPI and their only job was to
basically build the network which would
bring the bank’s incumbent banks
challenge of banks entrepreneurs
Internet companies all together into one
platform the third one that we learnt is
is how do you use technology as a
leverage point to create network effects
and that’s where standardization is very
important which is where we have taken
this approach of building open API in
India which are now known as India stack
and these standardizations basically
allow combinatorial innovation to happen
and build network effects without
allowing siloed systems to be built and
then once you have this usually what
happens is when you build a societal
platform people who have been in the
commercial business don’t usually get
buy into the idea of a societal platform
and in order to showcase value you need
to build a reference implementation and
in this case it was beam for UPI and we
used beam to basically rally everybody
else in the ecosystem to inspire
confidence in the network in the mission
that we are after and finally you have
to now invite the ecosystem to come and
build innovation on top you cannot be
now thinking about solving all your
problems and in fact I would argue to
say policy makers when they make
statements that we are going to enable
people to solve it’s not about
writing policy as documents anymore it’s
policy as api’s finally a Thai spirit
we’ve basically figured as a theory of
change if we really need to create high
impact if we need to inspire a lot of
people to come on to a singular mission
we can’t be thinking about incremental
change anymore now we need to think
about radical change with this I end my talk thank you so much
why platforms are important in our lives
these are some of the names that you
would have seen platforms that we use
all economic leverage around the world
has moved the words building platforms
so the most valuable companies in the
world with a market cap of over five
trillion dollars are all platforms today
which enable people to communicate small
businesses to interact with consumers
and so on so it’s becoming increasingly
important that we use platforms for
building commercial value and today my
story is about talking to you is or on
how do we use platforms to build or
bring about societal change this journey
started to me in 2016 February just like
any other bangalore ian boy i am also an
engineer i was expected to go to us to
do my masters decided to stay back and
then i came i stumbled upon this
intersection of policy platforms and
products i joined i spirit as a fellow
and took up the responsibility to build
the ecosystem for unified payments
interface along with npc i not too far
away from here at dodge we launched UPI
as a protocol as as a technology launch
wherein we had over 330 developers and
around 30 bankers in the room so UPI was
conceived to be a api LED payments
platform and this journey has helped me
believe that today we can solve a lot of
hard problems by building societal
platforms it opened up to me to say that
for for a long time we thought about
solving social problems through policy
now how about we start looking about
policy in the eyes of a platform to go
back to give you context in 2016
india had issued over 600 million plus
debit cards with over 1 billion people
enrolled in other the jonathan program
was a huge success and millions of
Indians got access to bank accounts even
before they got access to actual toilets
however we still had this issue that in
spite of having so many people under the
banking system the Digital payment
adoption was actually less than five
percent and this was largely due to
fragmented payment systems and
cumbersome user experiences many
a few would have experienced going back
to your banks signing up a long form to
enable your mobile banking and so on to
get started so this had led to this
fragmentation of various different
payment systems to be built in India and
and we didn’t have meaningful adoption
both from merchants and consumers so to
solve for this
the RBI came up with a vision policy and
along with NPC I envisioned UPI to
become a public payments platform and
the goal of UPI was very simple to do
one thing well which is solve for money
movement between two accounts and it was
by design designed to basically be a
public payment system which would not
profit but would allow people to create
value on top of it and UPI was actually
designed as a a payments markup language
which would allow payment transfer
between bank accounts it will allow
payments transfer between wallets and so
on and so forth enabling a host of use
cases for p2p payments p2m payments and
so on and so forth however what this
cost was cognitive dissonance two people
who are already in the industry because
the bankers were always the bankers
always thought about building payment
systems as to a revenue stream a stream
through which they could make money so
this was causing dissonance on how do I
now start thinking about a public
payments platform so it really didn’t
have any much backers till November 2016
Wendy monetization happen so d monetize
Wendy monetization happened due to the
cash crunch policymakers regulators
bankers entrepreneurs everybody came
together to realize that hey look we
have this platform which has already
been built now how do we leverage this
so this provided as a policy window to
basically align a wide variety of
stakeholders onto a single platform and
focus however we still had a challenge
upî by design allowed people to create
multiple payment apps so by the time in
november we actually had 20-plus apps
which were launched by different banks
however the government couldn’t figure
out which apps should I promote so they
came up with this idea to say how about
we build a common app which will
basically showcase the value of the
platform which will rally
all the banks together and thus beam was
born into December 2016 it was a
three-week effort which I had the
fortunate to lead the team to build and
this actually showcase that in three
weeks you could actually now design an
app ground up for India based on a
platform and launch it at scale so we
built an Android app we built an iOS app
also overnight we replaced the start9 9
– protocol which is basically the ussd
protocol that allows money transfer to
happen between feature phones so within
these three weeks we built and took this
app to Delhi all the policymakers loved
it and the PM put his weight behind it
and then beam became the fastest
downloaded app ever in Indian Play Store
history it reached 10 million downloads
in the first 10 days and what we did
with Beam was we used it to basically
bring a lot of people onto the platform
use the data that we generated from beam
to basically improve our success rates
so that there is more confidence in the
platform so that we could invite more of
the stakeholders to come and build on
top of it and by the end we now had a
wide variety of players a mix of both
Indian entrepreneurs and global
entrepreneurs and suddenly India became
the fastest or the largest playground
for people to build on top and what is
important to note is that we ended up
creating an open architecture which
allowed multiple apps and multiple
innovators to build around the same
rails without allowing people to build
islands of payment platforms examples of
this is in China where there are only
two apps which basically control 90% of
the market share
however in India today we have a vibrant
ecosystem of various different people
solving for consumer payment solving for
merchant payments solving for government
to consumer payments and so on and so
forth and most importantly it allowed a
layer of innovation which allowed people
to now build payment experiences using
audio QR people built now our payment
experiences using low-cost Bluetooth
devices and so on and so forth so today
18 months later UPI is the fastest
growing payments platform it did 246
million
transactions in the last month just to
put this into perspective it took nine
years for I MPs to reach this kind of
scale and we did this in 18 months and
it also processed around 40,000 crores
and it’s growing at a rapid speed morgan
stanley estimates that UPI will
contribute or will process 450 billion
dollars in the next five years and it
will basically aid a number of use cases
like payments it’ll enable micro
insurance it’ll enable lending and it’ll
enable formal savings across various
different ecosystem players who are
building on top of this so what was a
big learning out of this the big
learning out of this was that we need to
build societal platforms and these
societal platforms by design need to be
public goods and then they’re asked we
need to allow combinatorial innovation
and value creation on top of them unlike
existing platforms which I spoke about
in the earlier slides so we need in
India we’ve basically applied this
learning into various different sectors
today
ayushman bharat which is the most
ambitious healthcare program in in the
world which is expected to cover 500
million Indians under a health universal
health insurance program is now being
built on a foundation of what is called
as the National Health stack which is
basically a foundation of various
different artifacts which allow people
to come together and solve similarly we
are approaching this to solve for micro
insurance for farmers where we’re trying
to build what is called as drone stack
which will enable a drone a pilot to
apply for a licence to get a license and
fly a drone in real time create a
trusted data source and provide a micro
insurance product for a consumer
similarly we’ve also applied this in
travel we’re looking at the same it with
credit with RBI trying to build what is
called as the public credit registry we
were also building what is called as
data fiduciaries which are basically
these entities which are designed not to
make any money on top of your data but
only to empower you to get your data
from various different data sources so
if you’re a policymaker or a regulator
or anybody who’s working in any of these
segments a question that you should ask
yourself is like how do you leverage
power of these platforms to build
various different people together to
solve some of the hard problems and
here’s a frame-up for you to think about
how to build societal platforms every
hard problem that we think about in the
world is actually really hard right you
cannot solve this problem in in totality
so the first step for you to do is to
basically break down the problem and
unbundle the problem so if you talk
about Financial Inclusion in India
Financial Inclusion in India required
multiple things to happen the first
thing is that we had to give an identity
to every Indian so that’s where Arthur
was conceived and the second step after
universal banking coverage was to
basically build this low-cost payments
layer and that’s how of UPI was
conceived so once you have unbundled
your problems in two different sectors
then you basically find an operating
agency who can solve this problem really
well and just do that one thing in the
case of UPI
it was the national payments Corporation
of India which is tasked with the to
build UPI and their only job was to
basically build the network which would
bring the bank’s incumbent banks
challenge of banks entrepreneurs
Internet companies all together into one
platform the third one that we learnt is
is how do you use technology as a
leverage point to create network effects
and that’s where standardization is very
important which is where we have taken
this approach of building open API in
India which are now known as India stack
and these standardizations basically
allow combinatorial innovation to happen
and build network effects without
allowing siloed systems to be built and
then once you have this usually what
happens is when you build a societal
platform people who have been in the
commercial business don’t usually get
buy into the idea of a societal platform
and in order to showcase value you need
to build a reference implementation and
in this case it was beam for UPI and we
used beam to basically rally everybody
else in the ecosystem to inspire
confidence in the network in the mission
that we are after and finally you have
to now invite the ecosystem to come and
build innovation on top you cannot be
now thinking about solving all your
problems and in fact I would argue to
say policy makers when they make
statements that we are going to enable
people to solve it’s not about
writing policy as documents anymore it’s
policy as api’s finally a Thai spirit
we’ve basically figured as a theory of
change if we really need to create high
impact if we need to inspire a lot of
people to come on to a singular mission
we can’t be thinking about incremental
change anymore now we need to think
about radical change with this I end my talk thank you so much
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