Hectic fundraising through IPOs will continue next week, with three firms -- One97 Communications, owner of Paytm; Sapphire Foods India, which operates KFC and Pizza Hut outlets; and Latent View Analytics -- are set to launch their initial share-sales to collectively mop up about Rs 21,000 crore. This comes after five companies successfully concluded their public offerings (IPOs) this week. Those five firms are - FSN E-Commerce Ventures, which runs online marketplace for beauty and wellness products Nykaa; Fino Payments Bank; Policybazaar parent entity PB Fintech; decorative aesthetics supplier SJS Enterprises; and microcrystalline cellulose maker Sigachi Industries.
India's e-commerce market is poised to grow by 84 per cent to $111 billion by 2024 on the back of accelerated adoption of digital technologies amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a report by fintech firm FIS said on Wednesday. The report noted that countries, including India, have seen a shift in consumer behaviour caused by COVID-19, and new payment trends are shown to be on the rise. FIS, in its 2021 Global Payments Report, examined current and future payment trends across 41 countries. India's e-commerce market is projected to grow by 84 per cent between now and 2024 to about $111 billion (from about $60 billion in 2020) driven by mobile shopping, which is projected to grow 21 per cent annually over the next four years, the report said.
For now, the concerns over bad loans have taken a back seat; a bigger challenge for the banking community is credit growth, explains Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Barring stray references such as the 'dual control' of banks and shifting the goalposts during demonetisation, he is not in a fault-finding mode with the government, notes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
However, in recent times, the clout that trader bodies such as CAIT and other organisations like Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Laghu Udyog Bharati has is steadily increasing. Earlier this year, trader bodies were able to convince the government not to extend the deadline for implementation of the new norms in FDI policy on e-commerce.
Even if the Paytm fiasco does not mark the end of the bull run, at least some sanity will return to the wild IPO market, observes Debashis Basu.
The bank is using readily available satellite images from ISRO and NASA for the purpose, and plans to scale up to 63,000 villages in the next three months.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday said there were visible signs of revival in the economy but the GDP growth may be in the negative zone or near zero in the current fiscal.
More than three weeks have passed since the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) new guidelines on e-mandates for recurring payments came into effect but consumers are still taking to social media platforms to complain about the disruptions they are facing. This comes as most stakeholders in the ecosystem have not put in place systems in accordance with the new rules, resulting in many transactions not going through. Industry sources said most banks are still not ready, especially the smaller ones.
That's because India does not have a serious venture capital industry with an appetite for risk, observes T N Ninan.
A slew of Indian firms, including Flipkart, Byju's and Zomato, is building a path to profitability and diversifying into newer business segments ahead of mega-IPO plans.
'Today, there is no easy money to be made after the run-up in equities.'
179 million debit cards were issued during December 2016 to June 2018. A mere 2,000 ATMs were opened in the same period.
Why settle for $400-500 million when you can make a billion or even more? That, in a nutshell, is why Krishna Kumar, 43, and Kashyap Dalal, 40, co-founders of Bengaluru-based edtech firm Simplilearn, one of the big players in the segment, sold a 51 per cent stake to Blackstone instead of selling 100 per cent as close competitor and rival Great Learning chose to do.
In the worst-case scenario, it will be next to impossible for tech companies like Amazon and Google to run any service that requires user biometrics.
$47.6 bn capital invested across 921 deals in India in 2020, despite pandemic.
The government plans to bring down its stake to 26 per cent in these two banks, which are yet to be identified. This may not come in the way of getting investors for these banks, provided the government is willing to step back rather than run them the way it had been doing for over five decades since these banks were nationalised, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Founded in 2015, Meesho is one of the country's fastest growing social commerce platforms, and provides small and independent entrepreneurs with products and tools to start, maintain, and grow their businesses. Facebook's interest in the digital commerce follows Reliance Industries' entry into the hybrid e-commerce ecosystem.
HDFC Bank on Thursday said network outages that led to a regulatory ban on new credit card sales were not due to transaction volumes, and affirmed that it continues to stay in touch with the RBI for restarting the services but giving a timeline for it will be difficult. The bank said it is on its way to creating a new technology architecture for the future as part of the "digital factory" and "enterprise factory" initiative. But, it conceded that outages will continue under the older system though it will be working to minimise the time taken to bring the service back. In December 2020, the RBI took the unprecedented step of stopping the largest private sector lender from selling any new credit cards and also launching new digital services, because of a series of network outages.
'If one can write 100-150 lines of good code in a day, they will always be in demand,' advises Jitendra Singh, chief technology officer, TalentSprint, an edtech platform.
Investment banking star and Moelis India Chief Executive Officer Manisha Girotra remembers a colleague who wanted to resign because she needed to attend to her parents' health issues in a different state. Rather than quit a promising career, she was given the flexibility of working from home on Fridays, which was unusual in the pre-pandemic days. This allowed her to take care of her parents' visits to the doctor and other health-related needs without quitting her job. She would be back in the city office on Mondays.
As many as 3.2 lakh shareholders attended the meeting on the newly-minted JioMeet platform from 550 cities in 48 countries.
The IT slowdown directly threatens the well being of other industries as well as India's IT cities. This impact has not necessarily been factored in, yet.
The project is supported by the Department of Jobs through IDA Ireland.
The new restriction will be challenging for businesses, as they will have to do regular follow-ups with their suppliers.
Enthused by India's financial inclusion drive, US-based Accion, one of the biggest micro finance organisations in the world, has renewed its focus in India. Michael Schlein, bottom, left, chief executive officer of Accicon, tells Namrata Acharya in an email interview the Wall Street and Silicon Valley are eager to participate in opportunities presented by the issuance of the small finance and payment bank licences, the expanded banking correspondent opportunities, and the Jan-Dhan Yojna.
Agriculture, social services, education, defence and so on will be brought into the digital fold and every gram panchayat will be connected to the internet.
Alibaba's pervasive economic and social influence in China is seen as a threat to the authority of the Chinese Communist party, notes Shyam Saran.
The RBI, which has no interest or mechanism to get feedback from bank customers, is unaware of this. If made aware, it remains silent, proving that it has no problem in allowing lenders to short-change its customers, says Debashis Basu.
These games of skill with a large social component have managed the transition to a new online avatar.
Leaving behind the luxe life and dapper suits of foreign banks, Puri and his team at the upstart venture shared fizz drinks, wore a footwear brand popular among the middle class, shared a rat-infested space in a yet-to-be gentrified work space to plan and execute it.
The race to get a New Umbrella Entity (NUE) licence for digital payments may get crowded. As many as six consortiums are said to be in the fray to apply for an NUE licence, which would create a for-profit National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)-like body for retail payments. A consortium led by Financial Software and Systems (FSS), a leading provider of payment products and payment processor, is in talks and may file an application to the RBI for an NUE license, said sources aware of the development. The other constituents of this group include Indian Bank, Central Bank of India, India Post Payments Bank, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard), and a few small finance banks.
Industries with the highest number of top-rated companies at risk were hospitality/travel, media and entertainment, retail, financial services and consumer goods/manufacturing
If you are serious about your future, here are some MBA programmes and short courses you can consider, advises Arun Jagannathan is co-founder and CEO, CrackVerbal.
'Banking is a business of trust.'
Over the last 12 months, thanks to bold bets by venture capital firms like Sequoia, SoftBank Vision Fund, and foreign strategic investors like Naspers, pipeline of start-ups with potential to achieve $1 bn in valuation is at an all-time high.
While industry is upbeat, start-ups in the space sector are finding it difficult to cater to the demand due to a lack of funding, issues related to policy like foreign funding, intellectual property, etc, and a lack of support in testing.
Poor quality of education is one of the most important reasons for high unemployment in India, says Kavita Nigam.
A platform that helps retailers reduce failed transactions while keeping the cost down, Innoviti is all set for India's digital payments revolution.
In a bid to gain a bigger share of the customer's wallet, banks are ramping up their cross-selling initiatives.
