Investment Thesis Fego.ai

Early Mover in an Emerging Space

In Q3 2021, the Government announced a groundbreaking innovation within the fintech ecosystem — the Account Aggregator framework. In simple words, Account Aggregators collate all the financial data of a user or a consumer in one place to enable him/her to access it at any time and share it at his / her discretion.

With this framework coming into effect, an end-user will have complete custody of its financial data and visibility with who it has been shared. He/she will not have to access each financial account separately, and with a single click, can provide the entire data stack from multiple institutions to an organization.

This initiative is being led by DigiSahamati, an alliance of industry bodies, founders, and thought leaders in the ecosystem who are responsible for the implementation and growth of the framework.

We deeply believed in the power of Account Aggregators to allow the next billion to access financial services better. Beyond the top 100 million fintech users, there are several users in India who are new to banking, credit, and financial products.

Without a transaction history, it is very difficult for them to be able to access financial products. Due to a lack of real-time visibility of cash flows, companies and users have to put 100% collateral, which makes it challenging for them to access credit.

The Account Aggregator framework has the power to facilitate various use cases utilizing the underlying data such as cash-flow-based lending, financial products for new-to-credit users, and tailored products suited to the unique needs of each individual.

Experienced Founding Team with Demonstrated Thought Leadership

We were looking for an experienced team to capitalize on the potential that Account Aggregators held and came across two solid builders, Kumar Srikanthan & Kumar Srivatsan, second-time fintech entrepreneurs, who had previously built a digital lending platform.

On the first call itself, we could see the clarity of thought and strong product thinking they had. They were thought leaders in space and had worked closely with Sahamati as part of the Steering Committee to build the Account Aggregator framework. The founders had a deep understanding of the ecosystem and a vision of how they could build products using the framework for the overall enhancement of the fintech ecosystem.

With a strong 20-member founding team deep in technology, product, and marketing Fego is bringing the power of “open finance to every business “.

Currently, there are over 10,000+ non-fintech companies with over 5 billion+ users exploring the opportunities to integrate fintech in their tech stack and over 2,500+ young fintech startups with over 1 billion+ user looking forward to integrating embedded finance in their consumer stack. Fego has the potential to build solutions to empower this entire target segment.

Large and Fast-Growing Market

With deep penetration of online payments and the rise of user-friendly transaction experiences that promote one-click transactions, consumers are spending aggressively; however, access to credit is still based on traditional credit scores, which are backward-looking. To be able to capture this growing user segment effectively, fintech and non-fintech companies require access to real-time data to underwrite them better.

This is where the power of an analytics and user experience layer like Fego built on top of the Account Aggregator framework comes in.

The core IP of Fego.ai — categorization and enrichment of financial datasets to deliver personalized insights to users enables consumer-focused fintech / non-fintech companies to capture a large set of users and deliver delightful experiences.

High Composability of Use Cases Creating Network Effect for Growth

Companies using Fego can create customized financial products using experience and insights modules to provide consumers with services based on cash flow instead of traditional banking metrics. Some of the initial use cases that they can empower (only a fraction of use cases that are ultimately possible):-

• Budget Recommendations to provide a personalized menu or trip recommendations based on the budget increasing frequency of checkouts/conversion.

• Round-off Savings to help consumers make better buying decisions and in turn increase user retention.

• Gamify financial behaviors to increase user engagement. Companies can identify triggers and transaction behavior to increase ROI on marketing campaigns.

These use cases can benefit a company in increasing customer engagement and retention, up-selling and cross-selling, as well as maximizing LTV.

Beyond these use cases, with increasing awareness among incumbents, several opportunities exist to develop products for existing institutions and banks to offer a better customer experience across the entire value chain. We’re quite excited to be an initial backer of Fego and proud to be part of their journey!