The Shape of Work
The Shape of Work
#513: Dewang Neralla on transforming cross-border payments and India's digital economy
“The integration of digital payments across all levels of businesses, even at the grassroots, holds immense potential. Enabling artisans, hawkers, and small-scale entrepreneurs to receive payments directly into their bank accounts, thus establishing a financial history, is propelling a significant economic leap, promising improved access to loans and bolstering our economy."
In this episode of The Shape Of Work, we have an insightful conversation with Dewang Neralla, the Founder and CEO of HiWi. With a wealth of experience spanning over three decades, Dewang has made significant contributions across multiple esteemed organizations, notably Financial Technologies India and NTT DATA Payments Services. His academic foundation includes a B.E. obtained from Bharati Vidyapeeth.
In this episode, we unravel the tremendous impact of digital payments on societal transformation. Our seasoned guest, with a prolific career in spearheading digital payments, sheds light on how their company, Hi-Fi, is spearheading this change by offering comprehensive financial services to Indian students abroad.
Episode Highlights
- Streamlining the study abroad process for students and partners
- Digital payments for international student transfers
- What kind of social transformation can digital payments bring to a growing economy like India?
- Importance of collaboration and focusing on strengths to drive transformative change
Follow Dewang on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Archit Sethi
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks prides itself on being an organisation focused on employee well-being and workplace culture, leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.
Hello and welcome to the Shape of Work, a podcast series by Springworks. My name is Anoop and I am your host. Each week, we'll be talking to top people managers across the world on the future of work and how it's shaping our workplace. So sit back and get ready to find out more from these movers and shakers, as we have a no-holes bar. Anything goes. Conversation with them about their journey, their insights, their thoughts, most importantly, their ideas and vision for the workplace of the future. Join in on the conversation, leave a comment and don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Shape of Work podcast, and for this episode, we have with us Mr Divan Narella, who is the founder at CEO at Hivei Bay. Hi Divan, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Hi, archer, good to be here. Thanks a lot for inviting me to speak out here.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure to have you. So, to begin with, could you please take us through your journey so far and also share with us your vision of co-founding Hivei?
Speaker 3:Sure, as I say, all my life I've been more like a warrior. All entrepreneurs are warriors. I've been an entrepreneur for close to about 30 years now and I've been in fintech for close to about 31 years. From a career point of view, if you look at from my resume, if I look at bio, red out resume point of view is very simple Nothing in terms of too many companies started with.
Speaker 3:Bombay Stock Exchange's technology team was recruited for basically developing their online trading systems. 95 went along to co-found a company called Financial Technologies. Along with my co-founder, jigesh Shah, formed a company that we went around against the tide to create a software products company for the financial markets. There was a tech co-founder there where we went around creating, again, multiple markets. We owned and operated almost about 15 order exchanges, along with other ecosystem ventures. During the same time, within the same group, we had incubated a company called Atom, which was a digital payments company in 2006. So, from being a pure play tech role, I moved from Financial Technologies to Atom. In 2019, I had sold Atom to Entity Data Corporation, which is part of the Fortune 50 entity group in Japan. Again, entity Data itself is one of the largest software integration system integration companies globally In 2022, 2023,. I got out of Atom, which was now called Entity Data Payment Services, and founded Hivy.
Speaker 3:The fundamental vision behind Hivy was basically to look at the overall cross-border and remittance space. We had got a lot of innovations in the last few years. In digital payments, we've seen a lot of innovations in markets. When we look at the financial fintech industry as a whole, people often confuse fintech with lending. I would say fintech is a broad range of basically financial technologies that have been created under different verticals. So there is banking, financial services, which includes your broking, and a whole lot of other services, including insurance and all kinds of cool camera services out there. So we've seen in digital payments, a huge amount of innovations which have occurred in the last seven or eight years. Right now, cross-border payments was one area where I think the technology is still 1970s technology right now. We are not moved from 1970s in 2023.
Speaker 3:The friction, the piece basically of doing payment for the end consumers to basically the businesses and all I think those sort of bigger issues were there and I haven't studied those issues. The idea is how could we solve the problem for the people who are doing maybe any kind of a cross-border payment and that's what got to the birth of highway pay, and highway pay as a name comes in its high-speed wire. So we would definitely we were looking at helping people move money faster. And when you say help move money faster, it does not necessarily mean you break the rules and regulations. It has to be within, basically, the regulatory ambit. Whatever is the right regulations, whatever the country's rules and regulations are there, we need to follow that and under that, whatever we can create a disruption, we would aim to do that and that's what was the genesis of highway.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So as I was reading about highway, I got to know that it's described as a global cross-border fintech platform for studying abroad, because it also helps in providing solutions related to payments to parents, students, universities. So can you explain that how highway works and basically, how does it solve these specific problems that could be related to people going abroad studying?
Speaker 3:So there are again. When I say first, I think just one small correction there. Highway pay is basically a broad cross-border fintech and a cross-border remittance space. They're starting with the student use case because we thought basically that is one area where we need to focus on it because at the end, consumers, who are getting troubled a lot they're up close to about one and a half million students who are going to go abroad from India and they're close to about two and a half to three million students who are studying already in those global geographies. They need to be basically handled and they need to be able to do the remittances more seamlessly. But overall the flow is very simple. The idea is again the whole essence of our technology. Basically the backbone we're trying to create is create a technology which is very, very simple to use for the end consumers.
Speaker 3:Anything complex will become a problem out there. So, as we say, out there, basically for us the biggest constraints out there is our partners and including students and their parents also. So when I talk about, when you look at a study abroad ecosystem, the study of our ecosystem, the counseling or the consultants who basically help students fill in their admissions and basically build up their letter of recommendations and essays and other things and help a lot of the students. They're the primary drivers of growth for us, so they become our fundamental partners Number one. Number two is basically again from a student point of view. We're again looking at what sort of technologies can we create and make it easier for students and their parents to do, basically do the transactions out there. So one first is basically we created a web portal for consultants to help refer students to us. Number one it's where they can definitely show us to us and help students do multiple things, for example, right from doing remittances to apply for loans to multiple things. They can do it from their own portal out there, from the education consultants portal. The idea is because any student coming the first top of entry is basically the consultant and that's where they can talk to the consultant, basically get referred to us. The moment a student is referred to us, the whole journey changes to basically DIY kind of a journey for a student where we send out an email to the student to download the app. Once the student downloads the app again the idea is app is the property for a student, not only when the student is applying or maybe paying or picking the tuition fee payments or doing other things. The idea is basically, can he take this physically app and use the same app in the foreign geography as well?
Speaker 3:And there are a lot of things that we're trying to do. Number one is basically we're helping students do remittances. So the entire flow of remittance in terms of sending money out to the specific universities, including for the subsequent initial living expenses and all they can do. They can do it for accommodation and other things. They can make those payments from the app itself and then they can design basically. So, again, as I said, because there are a lot of regulations that need to be followed out there.
Speaker 3:So, in terms of basically currently for the fund transfer for remittances, you have something called as an A2 form which needs to be filled by everybody and needs to be recorded with all your past transactions also. So if a hypothetical student has done some past transaction and maybe application fees or something in terms of doing foreign remittances, those are captured by our system. The data is stored in our system itself. The idea is basically to help the student, not they don't need to keep on basically doing. The current pain point is every time they go to a bank. They need to remember what was the last transaction they did, when did they do the transaction, which banker they used for doing the transaction. Was it their own banker, was it any other for authorized forage deal or anything else where they were doing the transaction from. Plus, basically, generating all those record keeping and all becomes a kind of a hassle for them.
Speaker 3:Second is basically, of course, the speed of, basically money transfer and third is, of course, the fund, fundamentally the rates out there. So there's a complete transparency in terms of the rates, which is which they can see it on the app. Apparently, they know what is the IBR, the interbank rate, and basically they can see the rates around there. Plus, basically, they know what sort of markups and the limit on that. What sort of transaction fees are there. What is a TCS? Tcs is tax collector source, that they to pay for expenses to everything. So everything is done from the app itself and they go around making a payment from the app.
Speaker 3:Second is, basically they can be at the same time not only do your tuition fees but they can do their remittances for the living fees. So if they are in those countries out there, they download the app. They can as well. If they have an access to the Indian bank account, they can do and ask for, basically, living expenses as well as for accommodation. But at the same time, the beauty is basically we created one more application for parents out there whereby a student can generate what we call the collect request. Now, collect calls you have collect request in UPI.
Speaker 3:I think that was basically our, I think inspiration for creating this sort of thing, because often or not, students will not be on their own, because typically the parents who pay from the beyond behalf of the students.
Speaker 3:So you created a collect request for, basically, which a student can generate a collect request and send it to the parent and parent can open their app and or they can go over the web and make a payment on behalf of the student. So I just just create a very, very simple flow and, on top of it, for the student, we have created a loyalty program called Hi-Fi points, which they can redeem even before they go. They can redeem for things in India and once they go to the respective geographies, they can redeem for the rewards out there in those respective geographies. For example, if they're in US, they can use it for maybe getting some coupons on Doordash or something else maybe, say in Australia or Canada or UK. There are different service providers there. They can use it for whatever is relevant to them. So we have created a complete book here out there, and that's what we are aiming for right now.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's actually very innovative app and, I must say, with the kind of times that we live in, with the technology coming up, obviously I think it's been leveraged to a very good extent. I must say Also, I wanted to know that, you know, because India is like a growing economy and the digital transformation is something that we have been seeing. We all have been a part of it. So I wanted to know your point of view on this social transformation that digital payments can bring to a growing economy like India and how Hi-Fi contributes to this transformation.
Speaker 3:Two things, and it's less than the digital payments, because I have been my earlier author. I was basically driving digital payments for almost 17 odd years, so I've seen that closely, very, very closely, and seen the complete, transformative changes in the entire industry. Think of it. Think of yourself From an individual customer point of view. You go down to a hawker or you go down to buy vegetables. Do you need to remove cash? Right now, you don't need to remove cash. Everybody in this country, every, every vendor. So whether it's your own, the guy who's going and doing your delivery at your house to maybe a hawker, to anything I'm not even talking about larger, maybe businesses out there, of course, like a business, can afford to have digital payments. But even the smallest of the guy and the smallest of the payments you have using a QR code right now. And that is basically the social transformation which we've been talking about for generations to generations. So, for example, today it's the two things which can it gets giving rise to one Just people, let's say we call small, extremely small businesses, like hawkers and everybody else, like your artisans and all the ones that started getting money into their bank accounts. They have a complete bank history available with them tomorrow if they need a small business loan or something else, it becomes very easy for them to basically use and leverage that and get a small business. So simply that I think that will catapult our economy many fold from where we are right now. I think that's the biggest social transformation change that has occurred right now. So one and then, having said that, basically where does hi by help? So today, for example, when you look at foreign transfers and everything else, of course these have to go through Swift and most kind of channels it says. We have been basically Pushing for asthma digital payment channels as possible for students to go down and do an RTGS, to basically use payment gateways, other things to do transactions out there, including for small value payments and all we've been saying, for example, application fees and all We've been asked. I think students have to go down and use as much digital as possible and that's what is going to be. I think that's where there's a small contribution in terms of busy things around there. But tomorrow, as things change in terms of cross border, currently for large value payments again RTGS and all you have a kind of a break that shouldn't has to go down to a bank and do the transfer, but tomorrow, when you are, the AP is available to you to be pulling and debit your bank account and transfer to some other bank Account easily for large value payments also. Then the life becomes. I think we are going to see a lot more transformative changes occurring over a period of time and I think that's where the beauty of this is basically. When I look at something like hi-fi pay, for us Basically the critical path is a large part of people who are going abroad are not people from larger cities.
Speaker 3:Let's remember that visit. These are people from tier two, tier three towns who are going abroad, who are basically For the better prospects, want to study in a better prospect. Of course, india has some great education institutions also, but at the same time it's a question of competition is fairly to intense here, so that there is aspiration level of people who go down, want to go down and study abroad and basically do specialization Anything else. I think that's contributory to busy. So that's where ideas to how we can help them physically do their payment journeys and on, and that's going to be very, very transformative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally agree with that. So I'm sure there must be other players in this particular market as well. So I wanted to know that what sets your company apart from the other firms and also from the traditional financial institutions that we also have today?
Speaker 3:I think one thing that sits as a part is Very clearly we are a complete end-to-end player in this space of except a consulting. For example, when you look at the entire journey that, you break into three parts out there. One is consulting, second is basically pay a financial services and third is basically your accommodation and all we're fitting in the between out there in terms of Financial services out. So whether it is lending, whether it is going down and doing revitances, whether it is going down and opening up global bank accounts and operating, managing and operating those bank accounts along with forex cards, we come in and fit in out there. So we are not into silo eyes out there.
Speaker 3:So for my student point of view I think let's look at from understand from a student point of view we become a one-stop shop out there for them. We don't need to go down to multiple players, try to look at multiple things. That becomes easier for them to basically do and navigate. So the life is basically it's like a concierge physically for students to look at one shop, financial concert where they can do multiple things. Although ours centralized mode, the central theme for us is revitances. They're saying we help you move your money faster and more seamlessly, but at the same time, along with that, basically, will give you a lot more things which are more value as for you, and that's what sets us apart from anybody else amazing.
Speaker 2:So my last question to you is that what advice would you like to give to the aspiring FinTech entrepreneurs, especially, and for those looking to make a positive impact in the education sector as well? I mean, how do you collaborate?
Speaker 3:one basically for aspiring FinTech entrepreneurs. I think dream big number one, which is the most important thing. You can't have a smaller vision and I did it. Basically, we go earlier time.
Speaker 3:Very, very early times people were India was more of kind of I would call it a tortoise kind of an industry where people were like right into their own shells. They were not dreaming big. Over the last few years we have seen the startup culture in the country operating, operating up and people have started drinking big, really thinking big and dreaming big about growing and scaling up a lot more, and India definitely offers you those kind of platform to do that. But at the same time, I think they need to be again conscious of basically when they are raising capital from their friends, families, investors, anything else whole concept of profitability, because I think it's not about it Although people say it's sexy about having a startup in place, but doing any business is not sexy at all. It's basically a lot of grunt and groundwork that goes into building up a crude and great business out there and I guess the whole.
Speaker 3:I think the key thing is basically to ensure that you are profitable and you have a part to profitability. Some people may be profitable in year one. Some people may be profitable in year three, but you need to be very, very clear that you need to be profitable and that's your responsibility to all the stakeholders. And, of course, it coming into the ed tech space, I think Ed and FinTech, so Ed FinTech is again kind of like a fairly functioning area right now. There are whether in domestic or the international and things else I think there are opportunities. Of course, collaboration is the most important thing. You cannot physically build everything on your own. I think you have to collaborate, focus on your strengths out there, build that single most thing which can basically make a transformative changes, but collaborate and massively collaborate with people around and build a higher scale business. I think that's going to be having the network effect, is going to drive you to basically the next scale, definitely.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, devank, for taking time out. To be a busy schedule. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, arjun. Thank you and thanks to our listeners for tuning into this episode.