The Chillr storySimplifying Money

2003-2007, College of Engineering, Trivandrum

Bulb

2nd year - Bored of Electronics! Pocket money selling t-shirts, fireworks, books, mobile phones

2005: Sold 14k SIMs across 65+ B.Tech colleges in Kerala for BPL Mobile in 3 months. Zero marketing cost, pure viral, >10L in profits!

After 3 months of partying figured that building a business is more ‘scalable’ fun!

Bit by the

entrepreneurial

bug!

$

2006-2011

Co-founded MOBME with Sanjay & Vivek when starting up was not fashionable.

Raised 250k USD angel investment while in 3rd year of Engineering.

USSD/SMSC/Voice Solutions, VAS, M-Governance

MOBME

Kerala’s 1st

student startup!

Clients: BPL >> Hutch >> Vodafone; Airtel + Aircel :: Ops in 20+ circles

5 years, 200 people company, 5M USD topline

2006-2011 Witnessed 90M to 900M mobile subscriber growth first hand :: SCALE

What mobile customers want & what they don’t :: UX

Working with large enterprises, governments & regulators :: EXPERIENCE

Income > Expense :: PROFITS

No interoperability, No network effect :: WALLED GARDENS

Everything gets white-labeled :: BRAND

Vendors not treated as partners :: ATTITUDE

The GOOD, the BAD & the Ugly

Carrier billing was a bad idea!

Customers had lost trust due to force billing & other unethical practices

Telco wallets weren’t suited for India

We are not Kenya, we have RBI & government won’t let a parallel economy to exist

Regulatory environment is pro-banks

You want to do banking? Get a banking license!

Telcos hate the phrase ‘dumb-pipe’, but!

Multiple telcos agreeing on one model & helping it grow, not happening!They couldn’t envision beyond wap portals & wallpapers @ Rs 10

Digital money, the pending dream!

Rules of the game changed, tables turned!

Voice/SMS revenue impact on telcos

Margin pressure on vendors

WAP portals died, apps bypassed telcos

Network effect & interoperability

App Stores are BIG!

2012 - Smartphones going mainstream

2006-2011

Focused on Banks as alternate source of revenue

Did a bunch of projects for banks around mobile banking

Won them a few awards, learned the basics

Bumped into IMPS, NPCI. Beautiful platform, but no uniform frontend

Banks had almost written off IMPS due to MMID

Turning

Point

We got the idea of Chillr for the 1st time in mid 2013

Took it to NPCI

Send money to anyone in your phonebook without having to know account number, IFSC code, MMID or even which bank they bank with.

They said NO, since they are a bank facing organization and not a consumer facing one

Advised us to do it on our own by partnering with banks

Chillr could have ended up being a software service project if not for that answer!

NPCI was planning to revamp the IMPS layer to make it ready for the app world (UPI v0.1)

The million dollar

question!

November

2013Randomly pitched the idea to an Italian bank & they loved the idea

Advised to spin off the product into a separate company

Expressed interest to invest if we could go live with a couple of banks

B2B2C again; then telcos, now banks

Industry veterans said

No bank will let you create your own brandThey will ask for ‘white-labelled’ solutionMultiple banks on one common 3rd party platform is impossibleYou will need approval from RBI

Dec’13 - Feb’14

5 people team from within MOBME starts working exclusively on the idea

Chillar, Chillara, Chillarai & its variants in 7 Indian languages inspired the name ‘Chillr’

1st prototype ready in 3 months with SMS backend bounced off with friendly banks

Quick iterations based on feedback

Eat, Sleep, Code,

Repeat

Pitched to half a dozen small banksAssumed them to be nimbler and more risk taking

Figured that’s not necessarily true

When rubber

meets the road!

Pitched to half a dozen medium to large sized banks

+ve responses in 90% cases, but no definitive yes

Most banks asked for ‘exclusivity’ / ‘white-labeling

Higher focus on digital

Huge brand value & large tech savvy audience

USP - Instant fund transfers directly from your bank account, no more loading money into wallets!

HDFC Bank was the 14th to listen to our pitchSigned agreement in September, launch planned for December

July 2014

Good response from employees and customersMD’s mail goes out to bigger audience, 40k downloads in under a week

Launch email went out in 1st week of February

Letter from RBI with go-ahead; Registered Backwater Technologies (P) Ltd

December 2014

Breakthrough

From 2 day long on-boarding process to under 5 minutesAdding use cases: Mobile Recharges, Remittance

Improving experience

Getting the second bank was as tough as getting the first

Fund raising

In hindsight, going live was the easier part

Bank of Baroda came in 2ndAndhra Bank, CSB, PMC, Bharat, Federal etc came in later

Time to expand operations, MOBME had commitments to other business units tooGot 6M USD term sheet from Sequoia in July 2015 when at 2k txn/dayRaised a total of 7.5M USD with Blume, Uniqorn & Kunal Shah (Founder, Freecharge)

The Silk Route to tipping point

Early Adopters: Salaried employees in the 22-35 age group having smartphones

Where: Corporate campuses with good density of partner bank customers

Incentives: Tried everything from Flipkart/Ola/PizzaHut vouchers to cash backs

Failure: Nothing had the pull or the virality we expected

Learning: People wanted instant gratification

What worked: Dairy Milk Silk

100,000+ users activated in just a few months

The Silk Route to tipping point

The beginning! Now

Rs 1400/user/month

<2 txn/user/month

>80% traffic from major metros

100 Cr worth transactions processed

in all of 2015

20+ sessions/user/month

Rs ~9500/user/month (~7x)

~7 txn/user/month

Multiple hundreds of crores / month

60% customer acquisition via Referral

Dozen plus direct bank partnerships

30+ banks to go live with UPI integration

<50% volume from top 8 cities

4.4 rating on Play Store, ‘Best of 2015’

Recognition by Apple App Store

It’s just the tip of the iceberg

By 2020, 350M+ people are likely to experience

Opportunity : Reimagine Banking!

Credit SavingsMobileBanking

Insurance Investments WealthManagement

Data >>

>90% of Chillrusers are salaried

~40% of them go below threshold balance by ~20th

of the month

20th to 23rd - we observe a small

spike in P2P transactions

1st week of next month, almost same amounts

were going back

Pattern >> Opportunity

Informal P2P interest-free

lending

1

Payback mostly in <15

days

2

It’s a bridge loan, with

salary around the corner

3

Paying a fee is better than the awkwardness!

4

Ultra short term

Unsecured

Micro loans

100% digital process

Coming soon: Chillr Credit

We love BANDRA

Bandra (W) is the most happening place in Mumbai & we got a lovely office

It’s in the midst of all the fun hangout/dine-in/party places, close to airport, middle of South Mumbai & Malad

But Bandra is expensive, especially apartments

Long commute = High stress, low productivity, less working hours

We started Bandra Allowance for everyone, to stay within 15 min from office

Now for majority of the team members, office is walkable distance!

Work hard, party harder!

Options Purchase Scheme for everyone in the team.

Weekly townhalls to update progress & sync up on goals ahead.

Chillr Thursdays - Internal TEDx like talks every week!

Work Culture, Equity, Townhalls et al

Just decide what portion of salary should be in cash & how much in equity

Happy team, happy users!

Happy users, happy you! :)

Core Team

SonyCEO & Co-founder

AnoopCTO & co-founder

GalibCPO & Co-founder

LishoyCGO & Co-founder

Talk to us!

ceo@chillr.com

www.chillr.com

@sonyjoy @mychillr

@mychillr