Gautam Adani: the billionaire vs the short seller

In 2022, the Indian businessman was the third richest man in the world but a short report at the start of 2023 saw the value of his listed companies fall by over $100bn. The fallout has spread beyond the markets and into politics as the story of Adani has become inextricably linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of the new India

Is India The Next China?

Although India has lagged behind China since both countries opened up to the world in the 1980s, the Indian government is now taking steps to finally challenge its biggest economic competitor.

 

Problems in Indian Banking

The run on the Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank (PMC), a small Indian lender, is now in its third week. This is indicative of wider problems in Indian banking. India’s financial sector needs to restore trust. How will it do this?

Read the full article in The Economist

Facebook prepares WhatsApp Pay to launch in India

WhatsApp is set to launch its P2P payments system later this year, beginning in India, before rolling out to its 1.5 billion users globally. The Facebook-owned messaging system has been testing the system in India for the past year, where the app has 400 million users.

Read the full story HERE.

Indian neobank “Open” raises $30m

Finextra has reported that “Open”, an Indian neo-banking startup that targets SMEs, is set to launch a "programmable" bank account after raising $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management.

Tanglin Venture Partners Advisors and existing investors 3one4 Capital, Speedinvest and BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate all joined the round for Bangalore-based Open.

Founded in 2017, Open partners regulated banks to offers SMEs and startups a business account designed to automate the way they run their finances by helping with things like payments and bookkeeping.

Open already has over 100,000 users and says it is adding 20,000 a month. This makes it the fastest growing SME-focused neo-banking service in the world.

With the new funding in place, Open is set to immediately launch a business credit card styled Open+, with a 30-day interest-free credit line.

Additionally, the firm is rolling out Layer, a "programmable" bank account that will let developers use APIs to build their own features on top of it and integrate with other services.

Anish Achuthan, Open CEO says: "This funding will help us accelerate our target of simplifying business banking for more than 1 million businesses at a greater pace and also launching new products like the Open+ card and Layer that will enhance our value proposition for small businesses."

Facilitated Rural Branches: An ATM-centric idea rural India can bank on

From ATM Marketplace –

“It is estimated that about 40 percent of Indians do not have access to formal financial services. Extending affordable banking and payment solutions to this unbanked population is an avowed goal of the Indian government.

In August, 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched an ambitious financial inclusion program, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, or PMJDY. The core objective of the program is to ensure that every citizen has a bank account and a debit card. It has been a huge success, having already covered 99.74 percent of households.

In fact, PMJDY has entered the Guinness Records for opening the highest number of bank accounts in the shortest time anywhere in the world. Within about five months of its launch, the scheme added 10 million new bank accounts. As of July 2015, there were over 17 million new accounts, out of which about 10 million were in rural India.”

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