Hyperface: simplifying launching credit card and BNPL products backed by Kunal Shah, Binny Bansal (021 Capital) and other notable founders

**Ashish Airon** (0:05)
A very warm welcome to all our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you will enjoy this podcast. Hi Ram, it's a pleasure to have you.

**R.V. Ramanathan** (0:19)
Hey Aashish, pleasure is mine.

**Ashish Airon** (0:22)
Wonderful. So let's get started. So Ram, if you can tell us a brief about yourself, then we'll talk about your venture.

**R.V. Ramanathan** (0:30)
Sure. Yeah.
I'm an engineer by craft. I did my BTEC in computer science from NIT Trichy, and began my career as a software engineer at Amazon, and then got right into financial services, and ever since I've been working in financial services industry. I built Juspay, which is a payments company. It's a payments technology company, and now I'm running my second startup. This is into again financial services only. We'll go into the details of it. I still do code reviews and design reviews. I am very, very passionate about technology. I believe that tech has the potential to solve a lot of problems, both human-made problems and natural problems as well. That it's a fundamentally good force of good for us, right? So that's the belief with which I essentially go about living my life.

**Ashish Airon** (1:36)
And that's good to know you still do code reviews.
And so what was the transition like Ram, from Juspay to starting something new? What was that sort of feeling? What was the thought process you wanted to start something new? What was the reason? If you can walk us through what really led to start of this new venture.

**R.V. Ramanathan** (2:01)
Sure. Look, I wasn't really looking to start a company after I left Juspay. I was trying to figure out what could be the next big thing in financial services. And this is when RBI had floated the new umbrella entity invitations, which is essentially creating more institutions like Visa, MasterCard and MPCI running card networks. So I was very, very interested in that and tried to figure out what all problems that we could solve in a much better way when we actually have control over the technology. And I think fundamentally enabling different kinds of financial services as a platform player. I've always been very intrigued and very curious about platform potential and opportunities. So that was the initial motivation to actually go and solve the problem or unlock value. Even when there is no problem to be solved, you can create a lot of value. And as I went down that road, I stumbled upon a couple of neo banking projects, one on the SMB side. This is, imagine, something like a RazorpayX, another on the consumer side. Again, imagine something like a Jupyter, right? So I got involved as an advisor to these projects and began looking at the banking stack and banking APIs. Imagine having like an open banking APIs on one hand, and a company, a firm like a Jupyter or a RazorpayX, they're integrating on top of that.
Went through that journey and it was really painful, right? And if you think about, you know, what was the problem here? See, banks are fundamentally not technology institutions, right? That is not the right barometer for them. They are fundamentally institutions of trust, right? And holding them responsible for building an amazing technology is not fair at all, right?
But unfortunately, you know, tech is what bridges the gap between a banking institution and a consumer institution, say like a Jupiter, an Amazon, or a Flipkart, or a Razorpay, right? So now, bridging this gap felt very important because that would enable a lot of financial services to be offered by companies that are fantastic at delivering consumer services, right? Today, consumers are spending a lot more time on consumer apps, like, say, e-commerce applications, or travel booking applications, or even social lifestyle applications, right? So banking services are essentially going to places where consumers are already present, right? And enabling that is a very big challenge is what I realized, right? And this problem felt like it has to be solved, right?

**Ashish Airon** (5:21)
Great. So as a second time entrepreneur, so what is your experience? What are the things you're trying to do differently or you're following the same game plan?

**R.V. Ramanathan** (5:38)
Okay, that's a good question. There are obviously a few differences, right? One is access to capital becomes far more easier, which means that you get a lot of manpower from day one, like power, firepower from day one. Then doors open easily, especially in a space like ours, it is very important to have the right connects, right? So that's another thing. The third is credibility comes easier as well, because I've previously built a startup, right? So given all of this, the roadmap should look very accelerated for us. That is where we are bubbling down on, right? But that is the primary difference between my previous venture and current venture, where we are able to move at a much faster pace, thanks to all these ingredients being in place.