MobiKwik CEO says low digital penetration in India makes finance a big tech opportunity #IndiaFinance

Gurugram-based fintech firm MobiKwik sees huge potential in India’s digital finance space.

Bipin Preet Singh, Co-founder, MD, and CEO, believes the industry is still in its early stages with plenty of opportunities ahead, despite the progress made so far.

The company’s IPO on December 18, 2024, was an important step in its journey.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Singh and Upasana Taku, Co-founder, ED, and CFO, discussed the challenges they faced, including regulatory hurdles.

These are the edited excerpts of the interview.

Q: Want to start by talking to you about December 18, 2024, because that really has been in many ways, that milestone moment that you have both been working towards and waiting for. I want to link this to your comments that was made on one of our programs Upasana, where there was a sense of frustration, anxiety, but also excitement, that everybody is getting cleared, but not us?

I’m: The things that you work hard for, when you finally achieve them, the sweetness of that victory is amazing. Kudos to all the tech entrepreneurs in India, who have gone public recently. I would say that the journey for us was far more arduous for various reasons. Some people have also said that whatever can go wrong has gone wrong, so it was not so great year for fintechs to go for listing in India and many things happened during the year also, ups and downs with the market. It was, therefore, a harder journey for us. People are talking about it, because one year we filed our DRHP, but we had some bad luck even though everything that we had done was perfect.

Q: From the peak that you touched in December of over ₹600, it’s down 50% but the markets have also corrected quite significantly. Does that now put pressure on you? You have had a difficult quarter with the losses widening quite significantly. Has that changed the way you think about the business?

Singh: Not really. If you see, one of the first things I did when I knew for certain that we are getting listed, is I talked to one of the very well respected entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley. He is also an Indian founder and I asked him: how has your psychology changed since your company got listed? He said, one thing you follow every day, don’t look at the stock price. In these markets, BFSI sector, macros, what’s happening in US, these are beyond our control. What we can control is our business, and that business has scaled to a level where we achieved certain numbers.

Last year, we became profitable. Since 2021 was the last fundraise, we did it without raising any additional funds, and we got to almost ₹890 crore of revenue and some ₹30-40 crore of EBITDA. So, we know we can do it. We know how to build a scaled and profitable fintech company.

But does it mean that the macros will always be the same? The answer is no. We are very bullish on MobiKwik, on what we can build and are building today. The opportunity of digitisation in finance, what have we done and achieved in India, it is nothing. It is not even single digit percentage.

Whether you talk about UPI, wallets, stock market investing, digital lending, insurance, it’s all in single digit percentage penetration. All we have to do is keep building it the way we have done in the past, which is keep costs under control, be efficient and now, with AI in the mix, you can be super-efficient in terms of how you build your business. The platform and the foundation is there. Many people think IPO is like the culmination of something.

Read Here | MobiKwik Q2 Results: New listing slips into loss from profit, revenue grows 43%

Q: No, could this potentially be the start of the whole chapter?

Singh: We didn’t sell a single share in the IPO. Neither did any one of our shareholders. That tells you about what they think about the future of MobiKwik, I will not comment on things like what the valuation is or was or what the stock price is today. These are the people who have seen us perform over so many years, overcome challenges and demonstrate resilience to getting us here. We have ₹500 crore plus that we have raised in the IPO, which is in the bank, which we didn’t have. I would like to think the future is bright and we keep building.

Q: People don’t understand what it takes to not just build a business, but to cross the kind of milestones that you have been able to cross, to go through the challenges in a regulated sector. I had an interesting conversation with the Kamath brothers at Zerodha, and they were talking about the same thing. They said with one stroke of a pen, the regulator can shut you down, essentially. How has that been for the two of you to deal with?

Singh: It has been crazy and I had mentioned this to some of the relevant people here, when I was attending a meet related to fintech industry growth prospects in Delhi a few weeks back. When you are sitting here in Delhi or Mumbai and we are passing regulations and or taking action, we think positive or negative, we don’t realise that the people who look at companies like us, whether it is private or public, how they think about these decisions and what they understand and comprehend. Because it becomes like a pretty big black box where the clear conclusion for a lot of people is maybe the regulators and the government don’t want fintech.

Q: Which they have clarified to try and send out the message that, no, that is not the case.

Singh: But the actions that take place point to the contrary for many of them, and then it’s hard to justify that actions are against certain entities only, and it’s not against a particular sector.

MobiKwik’s current market capitalisation is ₹2,472.76 crore. Shares have declined 39% since its listing in December 2024.