Green miles to go and promises to keep
The world gathers for yet another pow-wow at the climate conference in Glasgow. What can we expect to gain ...
Neobank Fi has raised $50 million at a valuation of $315 million from B Capital Group, Falcon Edge and others in addition to an earlier interim round from existing investors like Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital.
The round has escalated the company’s valuation seven times from its $45 million valuation in its Series A funding round last year. The Fi app comes with an in-built savings account and helps customers grow and organise their funds. The customer account is an instant, zero-balance savings account with a debit card issued in partnership with Federal Bank.
On Fi, customers can create FIT Rules which allow them to automatically set aside money on certain actions. For instance, a FIT rule could be to set aside ₹50 every time the user orders food online, or shop online, or when their favourite team wins a match.
With more users being on-boarded, new FIT Rules were also added to include football, cricket, and the Olympics. The most recent additions to FIT Rules have been around relatable habits like phone usage, screen time, social media usage etc, that allow users to set aside money into savings if they manage to keep their screen-time down.
Financial assistant
Further, the app also has a financial assistant Ask.fi. that searches for transactions, opens a deposit, and answers specific customer queries like ‘How much did I spend shopping online this month?’
Sujith Narayanan, CEO and Cofounder, Fi, said, “The feedback from users has been encouraging and the app has been well received. We have been focussing on delivering a banking experience for digital natives that reflects their personality- simple, smart, fun and flexible. So we are going to continue to build on our proposition through ecosystem partnerships and new offerings, the funding is an added bonus that will fuel our growth.”
Also read: Open raises $100 million from Temasek, Google, SBI Investment
Kabir Narang, Founding General Partner, B Capital Group, said, “We have been looking at neo-banking opportunities across emerging markets and are excited to be investing in Fi. Fi focusses on serving the pressing financial needs of 60 million digitally savvy millennials in India. This is a large, attractive, and growing market especially in the backdrop of $180 ARPU for top retail banks in the country. Fi is building a modern banking product, that is receiving rave reviews from users of the Fi app and debit card.”
Smart deposits
20 per cent of the early users who were onboarded on Fi are said to have opened Smart Deposits to start their savings journey. The Smart Deposit combines the best features of the Fixed Deposit (FD) and the Recurring Deposit (RD) to help users save towards their goals on their own terms.
Sumit Gwalani, Cofounder, Fi, said, “We have observed that there is an inertia towards saving amongst digital natives. They want to save but never actually get to taking proactive steps towards saving. While designing the features for Fi, we have tried to keep the user at the centre and build tools that help them overcome this inertia. The uptake of some of these features validates our efforts.”
In September, Fi was one of the first fintech companies to adopt the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Account Aggregator (AA) framework and showcased its use-case at the industry-wide launch event organised by iSPIRT. Fi's Connected Accounts feature built on the AA framework will allow users to view their financial data from all of their bank accounts. The feature will be available to all users soon. Additionally, Fi will be rolling out an ‘investments’ feature on the app in the coming months.