Daybreak

Lenders are flouting every rule in their books to cater to the rising gold-loan demand. 

Thanks to the collusion between lenders and borrowers at some of the branches, one in ten gold loans every month is sanctioned through malpractices—like tweaking weight and misreporting purity of gold, said two industry executives.

In this episode, we delve into the murky world of gold loans and what often goes wrong when borrowers seek them out. 

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

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If you’ve ever taken a loan from a non bank or an NBFC, the EMI is usually auto-debited from your account every month. But if you missed a payment, you know what usually goes down. You are inundated with phone calls from your lender and maybe agents even start visiting your home. Not an ideal situation for you or your lender.

But now, your lender can just monitor your account and deduct the money as soon as it comes into your account…all thanks to that auto-debit permission you granted. Earlier, only a bank could do this when it lent money to its account holder. But now non-banks can do it, too. A fintech executive told The Ken that this tool will soon become business as usual in every lender’s tool box. But things are still not there yet since the banks are not predictably sharing the statement data or their servers are down.

And here’s where account aggregators come into the picture. These aggregators are a newly-created class of licensed companies by the Reserve Bank of India. They basically help businesses exchange financial information about a user after taking the user’s consent. 

Meanwhile, Navi Finserv, a four-year-old non-bank, is quite particular about how fast it can help its users take out a loan. Navi’s co-founder and CEO Sachin Bansal—who previously co-founded the Flipkart —believes “banking should be as easy as going on Swiggy and ordering food”. So to amp up both disbursals and collections, Navi and others like it are counting on account aggregators. But being able to access a borrower’s bank statement at any given time is a powerful collection tool.

And the problem is how Navi is using this power.

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The pandemic disrupted everyone's travel plans. But now, everyone is travelling with a vengeance and it's really overloading the systems. 

With visa appointment slots hard to come by, travel agents have turned securing visa dates into a profitable business. Meanwhile, embassies and consulates are trying hard to limit the wait list. 

And at the center of this anxiety-inducing maze is one company called VFS global that handles the visa application process for more than 150 of the world’s 195 countries, including India.

In this post pandemic era of the so-called revenge travel, VFS is where the dreams of many travelers’ go to die. For many Indian travellers, VFS is like the mean gatekeeper not letting them get to their dream destination.  

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Want to be part of the Daybreak community? Introduce yourself here.

What really makes UPI successful? The number of transactions. In FY2024, for example, more than 130 billion transactions were carried out through UPI. But it's not enough. UPI needs more and more to the point where now it has become a transaction-hungry monster. And NPCI National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), government body that runs UPI has to constantly come up with ways to feed this ever-hungry monster.

Its latest offering is delegated payments. Earlier this month, Reserve Bank of India Governor, Shaktikanta Das, announced that non-UPI users, like elderly people or teenagers or anyone who does not have a way to transact via UPI, can use another UPI user’s account and spend through it.

While many payments platforms are excited about this new feature, there are some serious issues that may become roadblocks later.

Tune in to find out.

Many thought the fall of WeWork – as quick and public as it was – was the final nail in the coffin for the fledgling coworking space business.  But a few years later, the pandemic is over and people are finally making their way back to their workplaces. 

The end of work from home has given the coworking space a new lease on life and one Delhi-based startup in particular is really standing out.

Awfis, a nine-year-old flexible workspace company, is breaking pretty much every rule in the coworking space playbook. And it seems to be working out pretty well for the company. 

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Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two here

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

For more than two decades, India’s jewellery industry has been dominated by one name and one name only – Tanishq. The Titan-owned brand has managed to become the go-to jewellery store for people across the country. Some may even call it the gold standard…literally. 

But since last year, things have been changing. Tanishq’s dominance is being challenged. Not by some massive international player or any other pan-India brand. Nope. Instead, it is regional players that are starting to dim Tanishq’s shine. You may have noticed all the Malabar Gold and Kalyan Jewellers ads and billboards that have popped up in the last year or so. Both are regional brands that have really been giving Tanishq a run for its money. 

The funny thing is all of these regional brands have risen to the top by doing exactly what Tanishq does best. They are literally hijacking Tanishq’s own playbook. And in the process, what was once Titan’s exclusive territory, with its 8% market share in a sea of unorganised competition, is now getting crowded.

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Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two here

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Tech platforms like Google, Meta, or even e-marketplaces such as Olx are increasingly becoming hotbeds of online advertising scams in India. People have been losing anything from a few thousands to even a few crore rupees to cyber crime syndicates who have  proficient, tech-savvy members.

The amount of money consumers have reported losing to fraud that originated on social-media platforms has skyrocketed since 2017. Last year alone, people reported losing more than $1.2 billion to fraud that started on social media.

What are big techs like Google and Meta doing to prevent these crimes? Is it enough?

Tune in to find out.

**This episode is a rerun and was first published on Nov 27, 2023

Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two here

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In Mumbai last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India was entering the bid to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2036. Yup, bidding happens more than a decade before the actual event. Because that’s how long it takes to prep a city for the Olympics. At the same event, PM Modi said hosting the games India is the “age-old dream and aspiration of 140 crore Indians”.

You see, the prestige associated with hosting the Olympics is undeniable…many would say, it is priceless. If you think about it, for a developing country, is the ultimate flex, right?

But in the end, is it really worth it? Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist does not think so. He has devoted much of his career to exposing the dark underbelly of the Olympics.

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P.S. The Ken podcast team is looking for a talented podcast producer and an audio journalist. If you fit the bill or know someone who does, please apply! 

For many in the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), this year’s Union Budget announcement was a damp squib.

On 23 July, several officials from the ticketing-and-catering arm of Indian Railways waited for over an hour, with the collective hope that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman would quash the discounts on UPI payments. 

The reason behind their discontent is that the discount has cost IRCTC an arm and a leg. The company has lost Rs 40 crore in revenue. But despite all of the pushback, this year’s Budget did not mention revoking the mandate anywhere. 

So, what’s going on? And why isn’t the government backing down?

Tune in to find out. 

P.S. The Ken podcast team is looking for a talented podcast producer and an audio journalist. If you fit the bill or know someone who does, please apply! 

Fertility rates in India are not looking good. In fact, it has fallen below the necessary replacement fertility level, which is basically the total fertility rate at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next, without migration. 

So to nip the issue in the bud, state governments are now stepping in to offer what private equity-backed fertility centres would otherwise charge lakhs of rupees for: IVF treatment for free. 

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. 

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