Big banks eye QR codes amid fintechs’ credit push; Google’s senior VP on AI regulation, and the future of search

Also in this letter:
■ Ideaforge IPO to open for subscription on June 26
■ Tesla eyes India entry soon
■ TCS wins $1 billion UK deal

Squaring Off: Banks want their QR codes at merchant outlets

Hi, this is Pratik Bhakta in Bengaluru. Today I write about how banks are trying to reclaim their share of merchant payments by deploying their own QR codes.

Acquisition drive: Large lenders like ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and HDFC Bank are going all out on an acquisition drive to on-board merchants who might prefer a QR code to a point-of-sale (POS) terminal.

ICICI Bank has 1.5 million active businesses using its merchant-facing payments platform, while Axis Bank is working on creating a mobile app for merchants. They are even building their own soundbox.

Story till date: Fintech majors like Paytm and PhonePe dominate the QR code space. While they use a bank in the back-end to settle the transactions, on the front-end they use their own stickers and apps. This has built customer loyalty for these brands, and also opened up lending opportunities for them.

SOS: So banks took a back seat while fintechs like Paytm, PhonePe, and BharatPe deployed QR codes at merchant outlets. Initially, all was hunky-dory given that banks still had the merchants’ current accounts. But eventually, the fintechs sniffed an opportunity and started offering credit to these merchants. This jolted the banks out of their reverie as they scrambled to stop their customers from being swallowed up by fintechs. Now they are aggressively pushing their black-and-white squares to keep these merchants within their fold.

What does this mean? It will be interesting to see if banks can actually create a dent in the merchant base of these payment apps. Will merchants, using Paytm or PhonePe, switch over to their bank’s QR code? Or will it be just another QR code among the many in the market? Banks are hoping that they can win over these merchants with love and loans. But that will not be enough. Banks will need to focus on the user interface and make life simpler for businesses. If that happens, maybe banks have a chance.

No blanket ban please, way ahead is to talk to AI experts: Google senior VP

The rules to govern AI should be “based on science and a deep understanding of the subject” and a “pause” in AI development is “uncalled for, as of now”, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice­-president, Google. A computer science engineer, Raghavan spoke with ET in an exclusive chat, voicing his opposition to calls for a blanket ban on the technology.

Some key takeaways

Next big Indian startup: Noting that “India is growing really fast, at a fairly significant pace’’, he said the next big startup from India could be one which caters to the unique needs of Indian users. For instance, startups that solve the logistical problems of delivering to remote corners.

Search queries to rise: “In India, about a third of our search queries are spoken. That is in contrast to like 3 or 4% in the US. So, it’s 10X more. That is because people here are culturally comfortable pulling out the phone and talking to it, which is not the case in many countries,’’ Raghavan said, adding that in future, search queries would be in multiple modes, such as audio, video, text, and image.

Small firms can make a difference: Raghavan is of the view that smaller companies in the generative AI ecosystem will make as much of a difference as larger firms such as Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI, and that it was not “hopeless” for smaller players to compete with the Goliaths in the game.

Read the full interview here

Ideaforge IPO expected to fuel drone startup’s flight

(L-R) Rahul Singh, VP engineering, Ankit Mehta, CEO, & Vipul Joshi, CFO, Ideaforge

One of India’s largest drone manufacturers is all set for its initial public offering (IPO) next week. Ideaforge Technology’s IPO will open for subscription on June 26. It couldn’t have come at a better time as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market is poised for exponential growth over the coming years.

Tell me more: Ideaforge, among the first entrants into India’s UAV market, offers its customers surveillance, mapping, and surveying solutions. The Mumbai-based firm is backed by marquee investors, including Infosys, Qualcomm, Celesta, Florintree, Exim Bank, Indusage Technology Venture Fund, and Infina Finance.

From Bollywood to D-street: IIT-Bombay graduates Ankit Mehta, Rahul Singh, and Ashish Bhat started the firm in 2007 and built their first drone prototype that appeared in the Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots in 2009. This was followed by its first fully autonomous micro UAV with a quadrotor configuration in 2009. By 2014, it had delivered 70 drones to government agencies, and in 2016, it got $1.5 million in funding, led by Infosys.

Price band, issue size, and more: The company has set the price band for the IPO at Rs 638-672 per share. The issue size will be Rs 567 crore at the upper end of the price band. Investors can bid for a minimum of 22 equity shares and in multiples of 22 thereafter. The company will command a market capitalisation of Rs 2,800 crore at the upper end of the price band.

Tesla gears up for India entry

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has made it clear that the electric vehicle manufacturer will enter the Indian market. It’s just a matter of when. “Hopefully, we will be able to announce something in the not-so-distant future”, the Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter boss added.

Starlink in India: Musk also revealed plans to bring Starlink, a broadband internet service developed by SpaceX, to India. “The Starlink Internet can be incredibly helpful for villages that have no access to the internet, or it is very slow”, he said.

‘Best to follow rules’: Asked about former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent accusation that the Indian government had threatened to shut down the social networking service in the country, Musk said, “Twitter does not have a choice but to follow the local government, or it will get shut down”.

“We will do our best to provide the freest speech possible under the law”, he added.

Blume Ventures makes first close of $25 million for new opportunity fund

(From left) Karthik Reddy, cofounder and partner; Ashish Fafadia, partner; Sanjay Nath, cofounder and partner

After the close of its $290 million fund-IV in December, early-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures — which has backed startups like Exotel, Grey Orange Robotics, Smallcase, Slice, and Unacademy — has announced the first close of its new opportunity fund at Rs 200 crore (around $25 million), with a final target of Rs 400 crore.

Fund details: The opportunity fund will have a portfolio of nine companies, of which four — Intrcity, Cashify, Carbon Clean, and Zopper — will be bought out from Fund-I. The remaining five will also be part of Blume’s existing portfolio of startups. The VC firm has already finalised the fund’s investment in online beauty products retailer Purplle.

Quote, unquote: “We want to make sure we have the corpus to invest more capital in the winners that are coming up. We also want to ensure that we hold on to our positions in strong fund-I companies that may go down the IPO route in 4-5 years’’, Ashish Fafadia, partner, Blume Ventures, told ET.

Also read | Avaana Capital secures $70 million in first close for climate fund

ETtech Done Deals

(L-R) Crib founders Shaifali Jain, Sunny Garg and Archit Chauhan

Prop-tech startup Crib raises Rs 15 crore: Prop-tech startup Crib, a SaaS-based marketplace for co-living, has raised Rs 15 crore in its seed round, which was co-led by WeFounderCircle and Rebright Partners.

Rural-focused fintech startup Navadhan raises $1.5 million: Navadhan has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Varanium NexGen, a fintech-focused fund. Existing investor Anicut Capital co-led the round, while Gemba Capital also participated.

SafEarth secures Rs 3.5 crore in latest round: SafEarth, a technology platform for the adoption of renewable energy, has raised Rs 3.5 crore in a funding round led by Anthill Ventures, Third Derivative, and Mumbai Angels.

ET Ecommerce Index

We’ve launched three indices – ET Ecommerce, ET Ecommerce Profitable, and ET Ecommerce Non-Profitable – to track the performance of recently listed tech firms. Here’s how they’ve fared so far.

TCS bags $1-billion deal from UK’s National Employment Savings Trust

IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has bagged a $1 billion deal from the UK-based National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) to digitally transform its scheme administration, months after Nest terminated its 18-year, $1.8 billion IT transformation contract with the French firm Atos.

Deal details: The 10-year deal is valued at £840 million (around $1 billion), TCS said. “The contract value is £840 million with an initial tenure of 10 years. The total maximum estimated value of the contract, if extended to the entirety of its eighteen-year tenure, will be £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion)’’.

Win some, lose some: The deal announcement comes after it was disclosed last week that TCS has lost a major client — Transamerica. TCS has won a few other major deals in the UK this year, which includes the estimated $1 billion Marks & Spencers deal, $700 million Phoenix Group deal, and the Teachers’ Pension Scheme deal worth around $300 million.

Other Top Stories By Our Reporters

Nachiket Deshpande, COO, LTIMindtree

LTIMindtree to spend $40-50 million on AI capabilities in FY23-24: LTIMindtree plans to spend $40-50 million on AI capabilities and offerings in the current fiscal to build a steady revenue stream leveraging the emerging technology, a top company executive told ET

Global IT spending on banking, investment services to hit $652 billion in 2023: According to Gartner, Worldwide IT spends on banking and investment services is forecast to total $652.1 billion in 2023, an increase of 8.1% from 2022.

Global Picks We Are Reading

■ China’s ChatGPT Opportunists — and Grifters — Are Hard at Work (Wired)
■ Here come the “metahumans”: Virtual avatars have real jobs in Indonesia (Rest of World)
■ American Companies Held Hostage by the Whims of TikTok (WSJ)

Also in this letter:
■ Ideaforge IPO to open for subscription on June 26
■ Tesla eyes India entry soon
■ TCS wins $1 billion UK deal

Squaring Off: Banks want their QR codes at merchant outlets

Hi, this is Pratik Bhakta in Bengaluru. Today I write about how banks are trying to reclaim their share of merchant payments by deploying their own QR codes.

Acquisition drive: Large lenders like ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and HDFC Bank are going all out on an acquisition drive to on-board merchants who might prefer a QR code to a point-of-sale (POS) terminal.

ICICI Bank has 1.5 million active businesses using its merchant-facing payments platform, while Axis Bank is working on creating a mobile app for merchants. They are even building their own soundbox.

Story till date: Fintech majors like Paytm and PhonePe dominate the QR code space. While they use a bank in the back-end to settle the transactions, on the front-end they use their own stickers and apps. This has built customer loyalty for these brands, and also opened up lending opportunities for them.

SOS: So banks took a back seat while fintechs like Paytm, PhonePe, and BharatPe deployed QR codes at merchant outlets. Initially, all was hunky-dory given that banks still had the merchants’ current accounts. But eventually, the fintechs sniffed an opportunity and started offering credit to these merchants. This jolted the banks out of their reverie as they scrambled to stop their customers from being swallowed up by fintechs. Now they are aggressively pushing their black-and-white squares to keep these merchants within their fold.

What does this mean? It will be interesting to see if banks can actually create a dent in the merchant base of these payment apps. Will merchants, using Paytm or PhonePe, switch over to their bank’s QR code? Or will it be just another QR code among the many in the market? Banks are hoping that they can win over these merchants with love and loans. But that will not be enough. Banks will need to focus on the user interface and make life simpler for businesses. If that happens, maybe banks have a chance.

No blanket ban please, way ahead is to talk to AI experts: Google senior VP

The rules to govern AI should be “based on science and a deep understanding of the subject” and a “pause” in AI development is “uncalled for, as of now”, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice­-president, Google. A computer science engineer, Raghavan spoke with ET in an exclusive chat, voicing his opposition to calls for a blanket ban on the technology.

Some key takeaways

Next big Indian startup: Noting that “India is growing really fast, at a fairly significant pace’’, he said the next big startup from India could be one which caters to the unique needs of Indian users. For instance, startups that solve the logistical problems of delivering to remote corners.

Search queries to rise: “In India, about a third of our search queries are spoken. That is in contrast to like 3 or 4% in the US. So, it’s 10X more. That is because people here are culturally comfortable pulling out the phone and talking to it, which is not the case in many countries,’’ Raghavan said, adding that in future, search queries would be in multiple modes, such as audio, video, text, and image.

Small firms can make a difference: Raghavan is of the view that smaller companies in the generative AI ecosystem will make as much of a difference as larger firms such as Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI, and that it was not “hopeless” for smaller players to compete with the Goliaths in the game.

Read the full interview here

Ideaforge IPO expected to fuel drone startup’s flight

(L-R) Rahul Singh, VP engineering, Ankit Mehta, CEO, & Vipul Joshi, CFO, Ideaforge

One of India’s largest drone manufacturers is all set for its initial public offering (IPO) next week. Ideaforge Technology’s IPO will open for subscription on June 26. It couldn’t have come at a better time as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market is poised for exponential growth over the coming years.

Tell me more: Ideaforge, among the first entrants into India’s UAV market, offers its customers surveillance, mapping, and surveying solutions. The Mumbai-based firm is backed by marquee investors, including Infosys, Qualcomm, Celesta, Florintree, Exim Bank, Indusage Technology Venture Fund, and Infina Finance.

From Bollywood to D-street: IIT-Bombay graduates Ankit Mehta, Rahul Singh, and Ashish Bhat started the firm in 2007 and built their first drone prototype that appeared in the Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots in 2009. This was followed by its first fully autonomous micro UAV with a quadrotor configuration in 2009. By 2014, it had delivered 70 drones to government agencies, and in 2016, it got $1.5 million in funding, led by Infosys.

Price band, issue size, and more: The company has set the price band for the IPO at Rs 638-672 per share. The issue size will be Rs 567 crore at the upper end of the price band. Investors can bid for a minimum of 22 equity shares and in multiples of 22 thereafter. The company will command a market capitalisation of Rs 2,800 crore at the upper end of the price band.

Tesla gears up for India entry

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has made it clear that the electric vehicle manufacturer will enter the Indian market. It’s just a matter of when. “Hopefully, we will be able to announce something in the not-so-distant future”, the Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter boss added.

Starlink in India: Musk also revealed plans to bring Starlink, a broadband internet service developed by SpaceX, to India. “The Starlink Internet can be incredibly helpful for villages that have no access to the internet, or it is very slow”, he said.

‘Best to follow rules’: Asked about former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent accusation that the Indian government had threatened to shut down the social networking service in the country, Musk said, “Twitter does not have a choice but to follow the local government, or it will get shut down”.

“We will do our best to provide the freest speech possible under the law”, he added.

Blume Ventures makes first close of $25 million for new opportunity fund

(From left) Karthik Reddy, cofounder and partner; Ashish Fafadia, partner; Sanjay Nath, cofounder and partner

After the close of its $290 million fund-IV in December, early-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures — which has backed startups like Exotel, Grey Orange Robotics, Smallcase, Slice, and Unacademy — has announced the first close of its new opportunity fund at Rs 200 crore (around $25 million), with a final target of Rs 400 crore.

Fund details: The opportunity fund will have a portfolio of nine companies, of which four — Intrcity, Cashify, Carbon Clean, and Zopper — will be bought out from Fund-I. The remaining five will also be part of Blume’s existing portfolio of startups. The VC firm has already finalised the fund’s investment in online beauty products retailer Purplle.

Quote, unquote: “We want to make sure we have the corpus to invest more capital in the winners that are coming up. We also want to ensure that we hold on to our positions in strong fund-I companies that may go down the IPO route in 4-5 years’’, Ashish Fafadia, partner, Blume Ventures, told ET.

Also read | Avaana Capital secures $70 million in first close for climate fund

ETtech Done Deals

(L-R) Crib founders Shaifali Jain, Sunny Garg and Archit Chauhan

Prop-tech startup Crib raises Rs 15 crore: Prop-tech startup Crib, a SaaS-based marketplace for co-living, has raised Rs 15 crore in its seed round, which was co-led by WeFounderCircle and Rebright Partners.

Rural-focused fintech startup Navadhan raises $1.5 million: Navadhan has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Varanium NexGen, a fintech-focused fund. Existing investor Anicut Capital co-led the round, while Gemba Capital also participated.

SafEarth secures Rs 3.5 crore in latest round: SafEarth, a technology platform for the adoption of renewable energy, has raised Rs 3.5 crore in a funding round led by Anthill Ventures, Third Derivative, and Mumbai Angels.

ET Ecommerce Index

We’ve launched three indices – ET Ecommerce, ET Ecommerce Profitable, and ET Ecommerce Non-Profitable – to track the performance of recently listed tech firms. Here’s how they’ve fared so far.

TCS bags $1-billion deal from UK’s National Employment Savings Trust

IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has bagged a $1 billion deal from the UK-based National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) to digitally transform its scheme administration, months after Nest terminated its 18-year, $1.8 billion IT transformation contract with the French firm Atos.

Deal details: The 10-year deal is valued at £840 million (around $1 billion), TCS said. “The contract value is £840 million with an initial tenure of 10 years. The total maximum estimated value of the contract, if extended to the entirety of its eighteen-year tenure, will be £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion)’’.

Win some, lose some: The deal announcement comes after it was disclosed last week that TCS has lost a major client — Transamerica. TCS has won a few other major deals in the UK this year, which includes the estimated $1 billion Marks & Spencers deal, $700 million Phoenix Group deal, and the Teachers’ Pension Scheme deal worth around $300 million.

Other Top Stories By Our Reporters

Nachiket Deshpande, COO, LTIMindtree

LTIMindtree to spend $40-50 million on AI capabilities in FY23-24: LTIMindtree plans to spend $40-50 million on AI capabilities and offerings in the current fiscal to build a steady revenue stream leveraging the emerging technology, a top company executive told ET

Global IT spending on banking, investment services to hit $652 billion in 2023: According to Gartner, Worldwide IT spends on banking and investment services is forecast to total $652.1 billion in 2023, an increase of 8.1% from 2022.

Global Picks We Are Reading

■ China’s ChatGPT Opportunists — and Grifters — Are Hard at Work (Wired)
■ Here come the “metahumans”: Virtual avatars have real jobs in Indonesia (Rest of World)
■ American Companies Held Hostage by the Whims of TikTok (WSJ)