Building a Neobank in India
My experience from a 7-month product management internship at Freo.
Who am I?
Hi all! I am Himanshu Gupta, a final year undergrad from BITS Hyderabad, majoring in Pharmacy. One word that would explain me perfectly would be “Experience Seeker”. I love to meet new people, try out uncomfortable things & introspect on a daily basis in an attempt to broaden my general perspective.
I have been an entrepreneur in the past, where I solved for digitizing the inventory of Kirana Stores & making it real-time while running Trufynd. Recently, I have wrapped up my PM internship at Freo where I built Freo Save, India’s first credit-led neobank from scratch under the guidance of my mentor & the product lead on Freo Save, Dhaarini Vijay.
A brief about Freo Save
What is Freo Save?
Freo Save is a fully digital savings bank account in partnership with Equitas Small Finance Bank that offers a high-interest rate on a savings account, a personalized credit profile building journey, and potential access to high-quality credit products.
Why we built Freo Save?
We built Freo Save to solve for both, the user’s & the company's needs.
From a user standpoint, we solved for two aspects. Firstly, Freo Save made banking accessible, cheaper & user-friendly via the neobanking model. Secondly, the “personalized credit profile building via banking actions” proposition in Freo Save provided a worthy substitute for the need of consuming bad quality credit products to build or improve one’s credit profile.
Previously, Freo (MoneyTap) was a digital money lending platform wherein due to the nature of the business, Freo was not able to serve almost 90% of the acquired users. So, from a company standpoint, Freo Save provided a perfect way of serving such user segments & making them serviceable for near-future lending at the same time.
What did I do?
Spending 7 months & about 2000 hours building Freo Save has been nothing short of a marathon. I would like to describe my experience by following the STAR framework for effective articulation.
Situation when I started
At the moment of my joining, from a product standpoint, a team of 14 people across engineering, product & design was allocated to build the product. Adding to this, the partnership with Equitas Small Finance Bank was closed with commercials on basic banking activities were finalized to launch a banking MVP, Freo Save.
From a personal standpoint, coming in as someone from a non-technical background, having little knowledge of how a bank account works & having only used UPI as a digital money transfer mode, understanding the basics of banking in India along with technical fundamentals (APIs, System Design, etc.) was absolutely critical for me to be even functional at my role.
Tasks at hand
The primary goal for my internship was to build the neobank with a predominant user-first approach & successfully launch it.
After actively discussing the above problem statement with my mentor, I broke the tasks required to achieve this goal into tangible & intangible tasks.
The tangible tasks i.e. ones required to actually build the product were:
1. Coordinating internally (within company) & externally (with banking partner & vendors) to deliver crystal clear requirements & clear any blockers.
2. Doing banking product & user research to collate action items for brainstorming, validating the product value proposition & drafting a short-term roadmap for Freo Save.
3. Acquiring & engaging the innovators & early adopters of the product before launching the actual product.
The intangible tasks i.e. the ones required to upskill myself were:
1. Getting better at managing time & organizing my day.
2. Getting familiarized with banking, product & technical fundamentals.
3. Learning prioritization & the art of convincing, primarily with reason.
Actions taken
To get comfortable with the nuances of technically integrating with the bank partner, I built a working understanding of how APIs, Databases work & how to design efficient systems.
A big thanks are due to my mentor, Dhaarini for inculcating product thinking in me by providing constructive feedback on my day-to-day actions.
A typical working day would start with me organizing my day’s plan, prioritizing it with my mentor, following up with banking partner, drafting requirements for a feature, doing a bit of deep work in form of user/product research, giving presentations to partners/vendors, testing the Freo Save app, syncing up with different internal teams to follow up or communicate requirements along with PRD & clearing any blockers & finally, syncing up with my mentor to discuss the problems I faced in the day.
By comprehensively critiquing the existing banking products & brainstorming on the findings with my mentor & the product designer (Sindhura), we were able to narrow down to the initial UX approach along with finalizing requirements for the core features, communications, tracking & customer support.
To acquire & engage the early adopters, a waitlist with a tiered-reward structure was chosen. I was responsible for executing the implementation, growing, analyzing, and troubleshooting the waitlist end-to-end.
The waitlist is live at https://www.freosave.com/#/.
Working with my mentor on analyzing data gathered from usability testing of the Freo Save app, user surveys, a landing page/emailer CTR experiments, phone calls to waitlisters & competitive secondary research, I was able to draft a short-term (6 months from launch) roadmap for Freo Save.
Results achieved
Freo Save is expected to soft launch in mid-January 2022 for a closed user group (CUG) testing which would be succeeded by a full-scale launch in February 2022.
Freo Save has more than 75,000 registered users on the waitlist out of which more than 54% of users came from referrals from existing waitlisters.
Freo Save waitlist had an average of 75% week-on-week growth in the last three months. To experience this product, please head over to https://www.freosave.com/#/ and register using your email address.
Key Takeaways
Neobanks have the potential of providing a 10x user banking experience as compared to traditional banks but with traditional banks getting more & more digital, providing new & true value propositions is critical for any neobank to become the primary bank of a user.
Product management is all about deeply understanding everything. One is not required to know the depths of a topic but understanding the motive behind the topic & how the topic works are one of the core product management skills to have.
The art of influencing without authority is easier stated than practiced. Since product management is more of being a jack of all trades, a product manager should employ a learning-first approach with all stakeholders of the product; be it users, leadership, internal team members, or external partners. Understanding stakeholders’ perspectives can help a PM in improving their reasoning & thereby, prevailing a sense of mutual respect & learning.
My 7-month journey working in a hyper-growth surrounding has been a wholesome experience where I have not only gained crucial fintech, product & technical skills that will definitely be decisive for my career but I, also have evolved as an individual, working & learning along with super-smart colleagues & managers.
