Radhakrishnan Chonat: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our brand new podcast series, Beyond the Ticker.
The show where we go past stock symbols to uncover the vision strategy and leadership that is shaping India’s listed companies. I’m your host, Radhakrishnan Chonat, and today we are joined by Savita Vashisht, Co-Founder & Executive Director at NPST Limited, a company that’s playing a pivotal role in India’s booming digital payments and banking ecosystem.
With over two decades of leadership across global markets, Savita has helped drive growth for some of the biggest names in fintech and consulting, and at NPST, she’s now helping the company scale its innovative solutions in UPI, BBPS, digital banking, and beyond.
We will dive into NPST’s journey from a tech enabler to a public company, try to explore some key trends in India’s payment ecosystem, and uncover what lies ahead. Welcome to our show, Savita!
Savita Vashist: Thank you. Thank you, Radhakrishnan. Thank you for having me here. Really excited.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Excellent. So let’s start off, Savita. NPST has come a long way since its inception back in 2013. Now, for the benefit of our audience, just walk us through the company’s evolution and its positioning today as both a TSP and a PPS provider.
Savita Vashist: Alright. Do you want to – I – It will help if I actually tell you a little bit more about myself and the kind of, you know, navigation that went through me joining NPST. That helps because you’ll at least reflect why and how my mindset came towards NPST, if that works.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Sure.
Savita Vashist: Alright. So I, by training, I’m an engineer, and then later pursued MBA. And for the past 23 plus years I have been very integrally part of teams delivering and crafting solutions for clients globally.
And the beauty about my experience has been not just the projects and the clients that I work with, but the stellar leaders and the stellar people that I had the opportunity to work, and that kind of framed a very unique mindset in my mind. And very early on, right as a management trainee, I have had leaders who allowed me, who gave me that space to, you know, place my bets, to take those risks, you know, let me, allowed me to own those outcomes and back those ideas, and you know, what that did for me is instill that spirit of entrepreneurship.
And my definition of entrepreneur is like, you don’t need to be an investor or a founder as long as you know you’re being accountable, as long as you know the buck stops right at you without anybody looking at it.
That’s what entrepreneurship or the spirit of entrepreneurship meant to me.
And it is pretty much what has led me to NPST as well, so very, very different story here. The company was founded in 2013 by my husband Kaustubh, and I came in as the principal investor, you know, working with him on sidelines as an investor, and he was the main guy driving at that point in time.
And over the period of time I have been drawn, you know, into the heart and the mission of what we were doing at NPST, the impact that we were creating, and that’s when I’ve been able to join this company at the board level, you know, providing the strategic direction and bringing that 23 plus years of experience working with large international customers into NPST as well. So that’s the reason I said the journey is interesting. I’m not the first person who sowed the seeds in terms of doing the heavy lifting. That’s of course done by Kaustubh first, and then, thereafter Deepak and Aashish, but I came in more as an investor.
But the fact that I had that appetite to take the risk to, you know, identify where opportunities exist, because if you look back at my journey in the 23 years, the projects that I worked or the initiatives that I’ve taken, they’ve not just been opportunities which were, you know, strategized to transform operations. They are today key revenue contributors for each of those stellar organizations that I worked.
So I think my appetite to identify talent, appetite to identify opportunities were honed from a very young age, and NPST came at the right time in my career and journey as well.
And when we look at what NPST is doing, it’s trying to transform, again, a banking system, or, you know, filling in the gap in the fintech space very uniquely. We’re probably one of the only providers in the paytech space who operates both as a TSP to the banks and also provides a platform as a service to the fintech companies at large.
And this is that unique differentiator that I’m extremely excited about. I hope I answered your question.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Interesting, Savita. Taking a cue from that, you mentioned you’ve worked across continents, and you have led high performance teams. Now, what’s your approach to leadership at NPST as the Executive Director, and how are you building the internal culture at the company, as the company is scaling?
Savita Vashist: Very good question, and a very tricky problem at it, because if you look at the pace at which NPST is growing, it’s phenomenal.
And I completely believe in enabling people, because if you’ve given them the right tools, given them the right environment and then leave it for them to deliver as long as you completely back it up, I think that’s the most fundamental layer of how I at least approach.
And this has to be very thoroughly backed by reviews, not with the intention of, you know, micromanaging, but to ensure that the team is headed in the right direction. So those periodic reviews, to make sure the teams understand that they are accountable for whatever task that has been given, but giving them the freedom at the same time to allow them to execute and allow them to also enjoy how they have gone about to deliver a certain product or a certain solution. I think that’s my fundamental approach, and that’s the culture we are trying to drive in, right down to the last member of the team, that the accountability has to be with you if a task has been given, and but at the same time you might get questioned, but you should be ready with all answers, so you cannot say I need — so delegation is not the way of doing it, but accountability and making them more responsible is the approach that I generally tend to follow.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very interesting, making them accountable. Now you talked about your journey, you know, how your husband started, and you came in as an investor back in 2013. But now NPST is a listed entity, and recently it has moved from SME to Mainboard. If I were to ask you, how has your life changed post-listing in terms of accountability, transparency, and engagement with public investors, as you’re doing right now? So walk us through your journey, post-listing.
Savita Vashist: So I’ll tell you honestly, the kind of speed of work that we are seeing, whether it was on the SME board, or whether we were not listed, or whether we have been listed now, our journey, the speed at the pace at which we are running, that hasn’t changed. We are only running that much more faster.
So the — if you really ask me the challenge, it’s always striking a balance between there is a vision, there is a thought, and how quickly can we execute with stability. I think striking that balance has been the only change. The precision at which we were executing, and the speed at which we were executing has only increased that many times that many folds faster, that’s been the only pace.
I think the company is very hungry. If you really ask me, we’ve just begun, because for the past 10 years or so, we’ve only laid down the basic pipelines or the, you know, the basic framework for a transaction to happen. And if you now look at how UPI has just boomed with 18 billion transactions.
The use cases are only getting that much more interesting, complications are also getting that much more interesting, and which is where opportunities for us are galore, and that’s where you know the speed to pick up, what can we do and which team can we bring in? That’s the kind of conversation if you see, come to our office, it’s always bustling. We are always looking at that one meeting room that one could huddle in, and you know, look and trash out the next problem statement.
So I think with this evolution and the speed that we’ve seen, it’s also come along with a lot of pace in how we’ve been bringing some of our thoughts, and you know vision into reality as well. I think that speed to execution has only become much more sharper and better and then I’m extremely proud of how the team has been doing it as well.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Interesting. Segueing a little bit now, NPST, we know works very closely with banks and financial institutions, and for my listeners, would you unpack your business and revenue model, and how client relationships are structured?
Savita Vashist: All right. So from a — so just to make it very, very clear there. So look at it as two verticals, one being the banking vertical as such, and the other is the fintech, the payment aggregators on the other side. Now, if you look at the banks, most of these banks have been, you know, century-old companies and using very legacy systems. And then there is another, you know, layer of banks that have come up which have been born digital. So look at the dichotomy of you know, one set of the banks would be New Age digital tech, and the others who have got the solid base of customers, century-old, with legacy systems.
And this is where the opportunity for us came in, to transform these legacy platforms into the latest. So, for example, if they had to get into UPI, or they had to modernize their digital, modernize their banking platform or to get them into payment solutions, that’s the role we played as a TSP, like a certified partner to the banks.
On the other hand, when we look at the fintech community, there is such a big gap on what the banks could provide to this community, and what this community really needed from the banks.
Again, we then came in as a platform, as a service, to give them the entire stack of our solutions, whether it was your online offline, you know, transaction acquisition or reconciliation or fraud monitoring, the whole jingbang, to make sure that they are able to extract the services they need from the bank. And the very fact, we’re the only company who kind of works with both the banking and the payment aggregators, we had a 360 view of what the challenges exist at one end, and what is the service providers’, you know, aspirations as well.
So I think the solutions that we crafted, that’s why it became very more unique and differentiated and that’s the reason we’ve seen the success, because what we brought in was a complete 360 view, helping our customers and our service providers to see from each of their respective shoes. So that’s just at a broad level, explain A from a TSP and B from platform as a service for the fintech space.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Got it. Savita, you alluded to the fact that, you know, UPI is continuing to evolve, billion-dollar transactions happening, right?
Now UPI has introduced Credit on UPI, you know, there are international use cases, everywhere Prime Minister Modi goes, we hear that UPI enablement has happened. I know there are recurring mandates also. Right? So how is NPST participating or preparing for these developments? And what about areas like scalability, cyber security, or AI-led banking?
Savita Vashist: So you’ve pretty much hit like it’s like a bull’s eye on the pretty much the entire evolution that’s happening in the UPI space. So let me trace my steps back when UPI really started, and the kind of UPI switches that came into fore back then, they were fairly simpler.
They were not as modular or as scalable as probably they are needed today. The reason I’m saying it is you’re looking at how UPI volumes have grown. There is tremendous pressure that’s coming from the growth. There is tremendous pressure also coming from users who are using it, right, because their experience is changing.
So this evolution of sorts that’s happening in UPI itself is pushing companies to revisit the strategy on how UPI switches were adopted at the first, because, as I said, the primary switches that came into fore before were fairly simple. And now you’re seeing the need to have a secondary switch come in, not just because of either volume pressure but I think somewhere, even the regulators are also trying to push to make sure that you know we are not — we are able to cater to these diverse use cases like, you know, Credit on UPI, or making these merchant payments where we don’t compromise the primary switch, that we kind of isolate these use cases and optimize these use cases on a secondary switch.
So the importance or the focus on creating the secondary switch or modernizing the entire infra is always going to be on, because as I said, this is still growing, we’re still at the cusp of a newer era. I mean, it’s — whatever we’ve seen in the UPI phase, I think is still, these are still early days, because the adoption, once it starts to kick in, the kind of use cases that are going to come to us as we are seeing right now, it’s only important, it’s only critical that we keep investing in that direction so that we are able to respond to the growing demand that comes our way.
That’s Part One. Part Two, as I just spoke about the Credit on UPI, look at the dichotomy. We are close to 400 users in UPI, and look at the credit card penetration. One out of the four in India has a credit card. And if you look at any developed economies, there are — the credit card penetration is 20% plus.
We are at around 6 to 8%. So there’s a significant gap. And again, this gap is the opportunity that our regulators have very beautifully tried to bring in when we speak about Credit on UPI.
So imagine you’re at a shop store trying to, you know, purchase a printer or a TV, and at the checkout you don’t have to go to another app to get a loan or go to another service provider. Imagine having that line of credit available right at the time of checkout. So two things have happened. One, you’ve got a pre-sanctioned loan given to that customer, and the banks have been able to now generate a new stream of revenue.
So it’s a beautiful solution which kind of brings in that financial inclusion, expands the credit across the demographics, and the banks also are able to tap into generating that additional revenue. So that’s going to be the next big piece, and that’s the place we are working as well, to make sure, we, as I said, we want to latch on to every single gap that needs to be fulfilled. We want to latch on to every single opportunity that UPI is throwing back to us as a challenge.
And the third, once you’re looking at such a huge digital transaction coming up, fraudsters and scamsters are something that we have to always constantly be at our vigil. So I think by and large people have focused on the user side of fraud and risk management.
But I think there’s been a blind spot, and that’s been on the merchant side, and that’s the place where we’ve taken a bet by developing an AI/ML-based risk intelligence decisioning platform, which is basically to look at the entire transactional history, look at the metadata of a merchant, look at adverse media report, a comprehensive set of dataset only to help give that kind of intelligence on, not just at the onboarding level but entire journey lifecycle for the merchant to know if there is an issue, and how quickly, proactively can we go and correct that space, because the way I look at it, you know, UPI, or digital banking is going to go beyond just the transaction. It’s going to go and evolve to become more intelligent, more personalized. And that’s the place where we want to very extensively leverage both technology and very carefully watch the space of what the customers and consumers are throwing back in terms of what they need or the challenges that they’re facing.
So from the future, I would say, A) modernizing the UPI infra. B) Look at Credit on UPI. Third, look at, you know, mitigating these risks by putting in these AI/ML monitoring tools for the merchant space.
The international one is pretty much going to be expanding or leveraging what we’ve done so successfully right in India, and I keep telling to my peers that India right now is teaching the First World country what UPI is, or what digital transaction is, so feel very proud. And these are the success stories that we have to now adapt to what the international markets need. The fundamental blocks may remain the same, but there would be still a lot of tweaking that may be needed based on what the region demands. So, yeah, very exciting times.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very, very insightful, Savita. And yes, you know my cousins, when they travel, you know, from abroad, and see me scanning and paying sabjiwala, they’re like shocked. They didn’t realize the leap that we have taken in India. Insightful, very insightful! Keeping up with the same theme, I was just going through your recent earnings release transcript on AlphaStreet, and you have seen very strong revenue and PAT growth.
If I were to ask you what have been the key growth drivers? And are there any specific segments or client base within this that is contributing more to this wonderful momentum that you have?
Savita Vashist: So again, you know, with NPST, every time we feel this is the inflection point, we find another inflection point coming in, and, as I said, that’s completely driven by how UPI has been adopted and the kind of use cases have come, and our response to those, so we have never shied away in making those bets on those innovations or bringing those solution.
So our revenue distribution is more around TSP and PPaaS for now. These are the two places where we look at it. So we have revenue coming in from banks where we provide them as the platform, the services and then the PPaaS where we deliver platform as a service. So there again, we have some transaction-based, software license-based, so there’s a — it’s a mix of both.
I would say roughly around 70% of the revenue is being driven from the evolution that we’ve seen in the PPaaS whereas the steady block or the base block has been the TSP. But it’s interesting to know it’s the exposure that we had at TSP that kind of helped us identify the gap that we were able to build and create that solution for PPaaS. Now, again, what we’re seeing between TSP and PPaaS, we are absolutely thrilled to look at how can we become a complete tech enabler for the entire fintech space.
So no block becomes insignificant or very significant. They’ve always been very closely tied in in our journey. So what we’ve learned in the banking space, or what we’ve learned in the PPaaS space has always helped enrich the solutions on both ends, but from a sheer revenue split, what started as a TSP and then moved on to PPaaS. So the split of the revenue is more heavily leaned right now on PPaaS. And then Credit on UPI comes, I don’t know, I hope the base just moves in that exponential circuit. So yeah, that’s the way it is.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very interesting, and for the benefit of my audience, can you explain what is TSP and PPaaS?
Savita Vashist: So TSP is your certified partner, software provider. That’s where we build these platforms, whether it is modernizing their banking platform or the UPI switch or post-switch provider, and on the PPaaS we provide those platform as a service.
So those become, as I said, for fintech companies, for payment aggregators to be able to extract those banking services, you still need a bridge in between. So we provide that entire — we provide that platform as a service. So whether it is those you know reconciliation, your compliance or your onboarding, so all of that in combination is a platform as a services delivered for the fintech space or the payment aggregator space. So right, so, yeah.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Interesting, Savita. Now, if I were to ask you to switch gears, and you know, if I were to ask you to crystal gaze into the future, where do you see NPST in the next 3 to 5 years in terms of geographic expansion, new product lines or potential partnerships?
Savita Vashist: See, fundamentally, I think what we have done is to learn, latch on to the new innovations that come our way and expand in that direction. So that’s not going to change. That’s been our DNA that we want to innovate. We want to — we keep hunting for problem statements, the challenges in the market and that’s the reason we’ve grown the way we’ve grown. That’s how we are. And we are taking that same philosophy.
So number one, what we have done here, we want to keep expanding in terms of the problem statements that we solve, our vision is to be a technology enabler for the entire ecosystem. That’s the vision that we have. And now with NPCI themselves going into the international markets, taking UPI to these 20 plus countries, we want to shadow that journey as well.
You know, replicating the success that we’ve seen in here in India, and which is what we’ve sowed the seeds with setting up an office in the Middle East to cater to the African and the Middle East market to begin with and you know, take that same story, understand the local requirements, whatever the exigencies that needs to be catered, to replicate the same success story back there. So the way I look at it is to one, in India, look at solidifying the pace, continue to grow, continue to latch onto these new opportunities that come our way and also try and replicate the success story in the international market.
Keep a crystal clear focus, no complicated problem statements. I think this is where we want to place our bets and keep moving forward.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Keep a crystal clear focus. Lastly, what would you like to tell your current or prospective investors about NPST’s long term story?
Savita Vashist: I think we are here for the long haul. I think we don’t get deterred by shocks that come from the industry. I think we’ve been very resilient.
If there has been one change, we come back with three solutions. I think that DNA, I think that should give enough confidence, not just to my investors, but even for the team members that work with us or the prospective clients, that if there is a problem that you have in mind, we would want to craft the solution. I don’t want to throw technology in the face of any of my clients, and that’s never been our agenda.
We always come with a partner mindset. We always want to understand what’s the problem statement, how do we solve it. If it takes AI to solve it, we bring in AI to solve it. We don’t bring in AI just because we have to, you know that’s the buzzword, and that we have to impose upon.
I think our approach of looking at it as a solution mindset, as a problem solver and whether it’s domestic, it is international, whether these are complicated use cases, I think that mindset is the place where I would want not just my investors to place a bet on us but even my prospective skill, the kind of people that I would — who would want to come and work with us, or the clients that would — we would want to work with. So that’s the kind of an image that we would definitely want them to understand about us.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Excellent, excellent. Savita, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your perspective on NPST’s growth journey, its innovation in digital banking and the road ahead. It’s been an absolute pleasure diving into your story, and the company’s vision.
Savita Vashist: Radhakrishnan, always my pleasure here talking to you. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Radhakrishnan Chonat: Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this episode of Beyond the Ticker. We hope this conversation with Savita gave you fresh insights into the people, purpose and performance behind the company.
Stay tuned for more candid conversations with the leaders powering India’s listed universe. Until next time, thank you for watching.
