TRANSFIN. LongShorts with Nikhil Arora and Sharath Toopran

Our guest this week is Tushar Aggarwal, the Founder and CEO of StashFin, a digital lending platform offering flexible loan products in India.

Digital lending has enjoyed a meteoric rise during recent years, propelled by credit starvation in non-conventional cohorts, rising spends, and changing consumer behaviour thanks to a rapidly expanding digital footprint bringing in newer aspirations.

A seasoned financial services professional and entrepreneur with a CV that includes the who's who of global investment banks, Tushar takes us through StashFin's online lending business model, how the space has evolved in recent years, the challenges companies face in convincing customers to hop onto the digital bandwagon, and what lies ahead for the sector.

In the end of the day, we learn that while online lending may seem like a relatively simple financial product, it has its fair share of nuances, complications and levers that can be pulled.

PS - This isn't the first time we've had someone from StashFin on LongShorts. Click here to listen to our earlier discussion with Parikshit Chitalkar, Co-Founder of StashFin.

It's about time we speak of neobanks, no? 

Guess we were just waiting for the right person. :) Well now that's no longer an excuse. 

Presenting a super interesting chat with Jitin Bhasin, Founder and CEO of SaveIN - a neobank "aimed at simplifying Finance, Banking, Investments." 

A former senior fintech leader with stints at BankBazaar.com and RupeeRedee, Jitin distills over a decade of experience in fintech and banking industry to walk us through the web of data, business models, and regulatory nuances afflicting India's fintech industry. We cover a fair amount of ground here, from the rise of neobanks in India and what they are exactly to how fintech can develop its own independent niche within the banking sector. 

Tune in for this and many more riveting insights!

FYI: SaveIN is soon to launch its offering and has already been featured as one of Startup Pill's 101 picks for the best Banking startups worth a follow, globally. 

Our guest this episode is Jitesh Agarwal, with whom we discuss how startups and SMEs in India are functioning and the challenges they continue to face in the wake of COVID-19. The pandemic has brought about a lot of changes in management and investment attitude, and this has no doubt forced the SME sector to adapt accordingly.

Jitesh is the co-founder of Treelife Consulting, a Mumbai-based multi-disciplinary business consulting firm for startups and SME companies in India. Its pitch is simple: To offer tailor-made solutions in legal and financial areas to new entrepreneurs and to support them in their growth story.

Listen in for a riveting conversation on all things SME and startup!

We do a deep dive into Factor Investing with Hersh Tolani. Factor investing, a purely mathematical framework, can add much needed discipline and structure to your investing process.

Segued (as expected) into a wider discourse around investing - touching many facets ranging from quantitative vs. qualitative approaches, deep value school to more traditional philosophies. 

Investing is an ocean (assume the cover art would now make more sense!) with often no right or wrong answers. The key is to understand the traps and opportunities and form your own path.   

Hersh runs Tolani Investment Partnerships, an investment fund for select ultra-high net worth families who have the patience to invest for the long-term. He has previously worked with Standard Chartered as a corporate banker and has 15 years of experience in Indian markets. He is also the co-founder and CEO of InvestingHub.in - a video platform where India’s best fund managers present their highest conviction stock picks. 

Vivek Mashrani is a proud value investing and financial freedom proponent. He believes that both Technical Analysis and Fundamentals bring their own set of unique perspectives to the investing process and would rather combine them through a "TechnoFunda" route. 

In this super interesting chat, we challenge Vivek on value investing's recent perceived loss of relevance within contemporary financial markets. While agreeing with us in principle, Vivek takes a more nuanced approach towards how popular perception of value investing in India often fails to represent its underlying strength as a method, and how and where he draws the line in this own investing philosophy. 

Spanning from the rise of big technology companies, challenges in valuing technology based "platform" plays, to how to square Indian equities lucrative growth outlook with sensible price actions - we cover a lot of ground here, while having a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy it as well.

We speak with Madhusudanan R, reflecting upon the evolution of fintech in India over the past decade - starting from the initial hype around peer to peer lending platforms and e-wallets to how this new age sector has, naturally and by regulations, gravitated towards the traditional banking sector.

As founder and CEO of YAP, an API platform acting as a technology layer connecting businesses with banks, he shares his thoughts on the interesting marriage between public infrastructure and private innovation within Indian fintech and why it excites him. 

We're still "scratching the surface" in terms of what fintech can deliver, as per Madhusudanan - be it in verticals such as digital lending, payments or horizontals such as blockchain, big data and Artificial Intelligence. 

That surely got us excited.

Shachindra Nath looks at SMEs loans through a uniquely granular sectoral lens. 

As Executive Chairman and MD of U GRO Capital - a listed SME lender with a loan book of c. INR850cr, Mr. Nath has been busy deploying his vision over the last three years to serve this challenging and grossly underpenetrated segment.

In today's chat he shares his thoughts on:

- How to view SME lending/SME financing through U GRO's model  

- The role of digital infrastructure in pricing risk

- Information asymmetry: real or not?

- Strengthening U GRO's footprint as a tech enabled lender vs a pure-play fintech operator

Happy listening!

It has been nearly ten years of printing money and near-zero interest rates in most developed markets. Thanks to COVID, the phenomenon is now spreading to the emerging world as well. What was envisaged to be an emergency maneuver has now become the status quo.

How has this central bank approach worked? Where did it come short? How should one think about the side effects of Quantitative Easing on the world economy?

We chat with Colin Lloyd, a markets veteran (plus writer behind In the Long Run, a Top 100 Economics Blog) as he reflects upon difficult questions around rising debt build up and frothy asset prices over the last decade.

On the way we also touch upon his take around COVID responses (across countries) and the big macro trends and questions facing us.

This is a follow up chat with Dr Arun K Chopra on Covid-19. We spoke six months ago (remotely) when Coronavirus had just struck India to gain his early perspective on the challenges at play. 

As a Senior Cardiologist and member of Fortis Amritsar's Covid-19 response team, he now shares a refined view under the framework of what we now know vs what we thought we knew.   

From Covid's starting perception as a plain pneumonia-like condition to its evolution into a complicated disease spanning through multiple organs, organ systems, and immune responses, we chat with Dr Chopra across dimensions to understand what has changed in our understanding of: 

- Coronavirus Disease Transmission

- Coronavirus Disease Progression

- The Wide Variety of Symptoms

- Care Needed Post Disease

- Current Treatment and Potential Future Vaccine Fix

Viram Shah has been helping Indians invest in the US stock markets through Vested Finance, a company he started in 2018. 

We (at TRANSFIN.) have always found this theme rather interesting, considering US equities' global leadership when it comes to innovation and market dominance (exhibit A). Aside from the obvious diversification and foreign exchange market benefits (in most cases), listed US companies often set the tone for the rest of the world when it comes to superior disclosures, liquidity, and price discovery. 

Hence in this chat we walk through Viram's take on this opportunity, as well as throw light on the constraints facing Indians who want to broaden their equity exposure and risk exposure beyond borders, ranging across operational, regulatory, or taxation domains. 

On the way we also take stock of the ebbs and flows characterising markets at-large especially in a post Covid paradigm. 

Hope you have fun listening in.