Summary

The Offline Network Episode 33: Founders & Operators (aired 2025-11-14). Guests: Abhinav Agarwal from Doormint / Eluno / Swiftlearn. Dhruv: "But Utsav, I think you are using a smart ring as a barometer to measure your health matrices, right?" Dhruv: "And other part is, of course, the good push from the Indian regulators, especially in the gift city." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, consumer brands and D2C, health tech. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. Hello listeners, welcome to the Venice stream of T.O.N. Today, you'll notice a very new theme that we're trying out for the first time. I hope you enjoy the jingle bells with us. Do note that we've got a small Santa hat as well in the corner on the offline network. We're going to talk about wealth and credit cards with you today, but quickly running down the news with you before we welcome our guests today onto the show. Google and Axel, two big names, first of its kind of partnership for Google, where now they're going to start investing a million dollars each, Google and Axel, from their futures fund. First cohort style collaboration for Google. And Axel already runs a program called Atoms, where they choose founders across industry 4.0 and many other sectors that they've listed on their website. So do check it out. I think it's a good initiative for Google to come together, given that everything that they've delivered in the recent weeks leading up to this announcement as well. So I think Google is a good place to be or partner to have for the world of AI. Dhruv, handing over the floor to you. What's happening in the world of labor law?

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, so this was an announcement that came last week. So we didn't have a chance to cover this on Monday, but, you know, there was an announcement from the government of India that they've now made changes to the labor laws. There's going to be four new labor codes, as they put it. And one of those four codes is maybe we'll spend a little bit of time talking about them, is the social security code. So this is something that's been on everyone's mind for a very, very long time. Are we really going to are we going to formalize a role for people who work in the gig economy? And it's finally happened. So the government now formally recognizes gig workers and platform workers and aggregators. The critics say that they are not treating aggregators as fullfledged employers still, but it starts with formal recognition. There's language in there which will this I want to be I want to be careful here because this is a sensitive issue and we don't want to you know, we don't want to get this is wrong. But but the government does want, you know, workers of all kinds to be treated the same and, you know, employee benefits also to be applicable to them. Provident fund insurance. I think one way to think about this is if you were, you know, if you were writing for any any one of the writing startups and if you met, God forbid, if you met with an accident, who would pay for insurance or if you were, you know, driving a taxi and you were operating across three state geographies or, you know, three state boundaries, then which states, you know, rules apply to you. So I think a bunch of clarity comes in with this. They're also talking about a social security fund that the aggregators are supposed to be contributing to. I think one to two percent of their annual turnover, their top line. And that that is what's happened with the labor code.

Utsav Somani: No, absolutely. I think platforms like Amazon, Uber, Swiggy will contribute one to two percent of the revenue to a fund structure for these welfare programs. And I think it's exciting because India has got 12 million gig workers. So I think it's exciting. I don't know if even U.S. recognizes them. And this was a bone of contention and discussion long back when all of these platforms came about where everyone's trying to now have a second job or maybe a part time job or even a full time job or income that they're making through these platforms. And they don't have the benefits that a regular employee does when working for a company. It's good to see that India's recognizing all of this and formalizing this segment. Of course, there'll be iterations that probably go into all of this, into making this a more comprehensive outcome for everyone involved. All right. So we knew three India's existed. Now, Manish, who was at TechCrunch before and is a close friend of ours, has put out a report that we've not really spent too much time on. It's called the nine India's. And he thinks the twenty four hundred dollar per capita income for India is misleading. Dhruv, you want to share some stats?

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. So firstly, it's broken down India into what, nine segments itself?

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Nine India's.

Dhruv Sharma: Nine India's. And the report, I think, removes the top 82 million and averages out the remaining. You know, one thing I find very interesting about this, by the way, is everyone talks about per capita income, but not household income. And for a lot of households, your consumption basket is going to depend on your household income. But still, I mean, credit where it's due. It's a phenomenal report. Even I've just skimmed through this. But maybe our listeners and us, we spend some time over the weekend on this.

Utsav Somani: Let's make an infographic out of it. We should have actually done that and posted it. I think we'll do that for our community on the WhatsApp group. But I think the funny thing is that everyone says that India one is different, but he's taken it a step further, where I think if you remove the top 15% of households, they literally command almost 70% of the income, right? So the number drops to approximately like $1,150 per capita. If you basically just average it out for the first remaining 90% of folks as well. Confusing numbers, but I mean, just take a look at the report and you'll get a sense of this. We just wanted to put it on your reading list for the weekend. And yeah, Manhattan Project for AI. They have a pretty cool website, by the way, the Genesis mission that the White House announced. Have you seen the website?

Dhruv Sharma: I am yet to, but you know, we'd cover this in the stream. They got the Airbnb.

Dhruv Sharma: And this project is called Genesis.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Fantastic website. And they've got an interesting list of collaborators like AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, all the usual suspects. Funny enough, Elon Musk's XAI is not there. I thought they had made up and were becoming friends again. But with the DOGE, I think the group that Elon Musk was doing for the Department of Government Efficiency, I think that also got disbanded last week.

Dhruv Sharma: DOGE is, oh wow.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, it got disbanded last week. It got defunded, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, what do you make of this Manhattan Project?

Dhruv Sharma: The new, I mean, 2025 Manhattan Project. I think like, I mean, this is, is this the first time the Western world has made this a sovereign priority? It might just be, right?

Utsav Somani: It might be. And I think what they're trying to probably, I mean, just simplifying it, I think they might be getting talented level of access to train scientific foundational models and government data. So I think it will be exciting to see, because I think everyone's worried and wants to maintain their lead in the world of AI. And you, especially after losing out on manufacturing to China.

Dhruv Sharma: I think one way to think of this is you can obviously put AI to several different users. Not all of them have commercial viability, but, you know, can still turn into a public good. And that's where only, you know, the government can step up and should step up and do the work. And a lot of AI leaders have been calling for the federal government to come and do this. I remember when we had Akrit on a very first stream, even he'd spoken about the work that is happening back home. And he was a part of it for quite some time as well, the India AI mission. But yeah, good. We'll keep our eyes on this.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. And Google's 7th gen TPUs, they caused some share price movement for all the big other chip manufacturers, AMD, Nvidia, Alphabet. They were all down minus 4 to minus 7%. So, yeah. And they put out a very interesting tweet, which says that we continue to supply to Google and we congratulate them on all this.

Dhruv Sharma: Nvidia did this, right? Yeah.

Utsav Somani: I thought it was funny.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. Some comms specialists like Lulu we sometimes talk about. I mean, they don't think that's a good thing. But maybe we'll spend a minute on this and then welcome our guests. I mean, TPUs have gotten a lot of attention off late ever since Google announced Gemini and anti-gravity and so on and so forth. But they've been around, they've been quite some time in the making. And Google's announcing the 7th generation of TPUs. But even Nvidia's going to be out with Blackwell's successor, Vera Rubin. I guess sometime they're already in production. Sometime early next year. And if you talk to hardware architects and engineers, I mean, TPUs are good at some things and GPUs are good at some things. They obviously have different microarchitectures. One is more adaptable, more flexible than the others, which are GPUs. You can pretty much use them for all different kinds of workloads. You can use them for training and for inference. They're not as energy efficient as TPUs are, which is what makes them a little bit expensive as well. But yeah, I think to me, it seems like a lot of this is obviously to harness or rein in, I would say, Nvidia's pricing power on the chips. And yeah, everyone who's a main character in this race is also building Silicon of their own.

Utsav Somani: All right. With that, let's welcome our technical, very, very technical guest, Rupatak, who's the co-founder and CTO of IntMoney. Welcome to the show. Hi Utsav. Hi Dhruv.

Utsav Somani: Thank you so much for giving us the time. Lots of Dhruvs, like your old colleague, Yashvi, as well. Dhruvs all around. So tell us... For our listeners who are hearing about IntMoney for the first time, how would you spend the next two minutes describing it to them? Sure, sure, sure.

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): I would like both of you to show me your hands like this, Utsav and Dhruv. So I think people can see Utsav's finger, not on Dhruv. But Utsav, I think you are using a smart ring as a barometer to measure your health matrices, right? Yeah. So we are a wealth counterpart. So we are a wealth tracking app and let's say a whole network tracking app where you can track all the nuances of your network from multiple sources and get an automated deep dive onto it. And of course, actionable. So by actionable, I mean you can invest in all sorts of mutual funds and specialized funds. When it comes to Indian stocks and derivatives, you can do all sorts of spreading investments, SIPs. And of course, our moat is the US stocks part where you can go for global investing as well.

Utsav Somani: And that's really picked up right on your platform. I know you guys were the first ones to do that. What went on to enable that? I remember it's a complicated problem where you have to solve for so many different things, including finding a partner, the LRS, the different regulations that you have to do. So Indians never had easy access to US stocks before.

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): I think it's a product play as well as the ecosystem play. So both things and of course, the demographic play as well. So the awareness about the global equity has increased along with our exposure to the products on their side. If 10 years ago, I would have asked a normal person what Nvidia is. They may or may not have known the brand, but they now know the growth story. And other part is, of course, the good push from the Indian regulators, especially in the gift city. We're trying to make all of this ecosystem, the money movement and the consumer side policy is very, very regulated. When a system becomes regulated, it becomes more trustworthy compared to an unregulated system, right? So that is also helping in the increase in adoption. And of course, it's a market hedge as well. So growth means more adoption. And thankfully, that market has grown better than most of the world markets in the past five years.

Dhruv Sharma: When you went on this journey to create like a more complete financial picture of your users, how many different sources was data sitting in? How much could you like just bring in very easily? And how much did users have to key in manually?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): Yeah, so that's what our platform tried to do, right? So democratize this. So, for example, we might have one person who is an Excel geek can collate his or her financial data from 20 sources and then just do Excel magic and, you know, kind of three directionables goals insights. That's what we wanted to democratize. So in this also, the ecosystem has helped us big time. So earlier, our sources was your consent to some of your financial data from Gmail and some sources like, you know, broking pipelines and some sources like some mutual fund is a very good thing called MF Central from where you can read the data. Now, as the Bharat stack or the digital stack evolves, so you had payment pipes in UPI, you had identity pipes in Aadhaar. Now you have a very good system account aggregator being used heavily in lending, insurance, personal finance space. So we are also a super user of that. And all of this then gets collated, runs through our engines to give you real good insights. And another layer on top of it, of course, everybody talks about AI. So we have now AI assistant sitting on top of it, which are very personalized to your use cases and what you want to ask to them.

Dhruv Sharma: These are your investing co-pilots, is it?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): Sure. You can see them not co-pilot yet, more of a generative AI player as of now. But I think this year it would become an agentic AI player where it can take certain actions on your behalf if you wanted to.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And what's the scale of IndMoney right now?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): So more than 2 crore downloads, right? 4 million users. And in terms of our main mode is asset tracking. So more than 30 billion worth of assets being tracked on our platform. And that tracking then leads to other revenues that we have.

Utsav Somani: And what are, I mean, you've talked about the India stack. What are features that can only uniquely happen in India or Indian fintechs can benefit from which do not exist globally? What are some of the things that you would highlight?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): One, of course, is UPI, right? That has been a contributor to almost all the growth stories. And with recent modifications, like for certain lines, the UPI mandate or the transaction limit has been increased, right? Because the lower limits were not standing out for things like mutual fund investments or stock market investments. That's one thing. Another thing I think is the account aggregator play. It has automated a lot of digital pipelines that needed to be there and were quite cumbersome. For example, you know, for FNO, you need to show that you have some sort of income, right? For insurance and for lending, you need to show some sort of competence. So with account aggregator, the way account aggregator has evolved, the number of financial institutions which have become a contributor to it, that has also helped big time.

Utsav Somani: And if I was to, if I were to ask you the flip side, like what were global features or such intraplays that you think should have existed in India?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): Global features, let me think through this. I don't know whether it's a positive feature or a negative feature, but the kind of stock growth that a positive stock can have on a single day in US, or it is going 40% high in a single day in spite of being a mega cap. That thing doesn't happen in India because of the circuit limits we have. Maybe it's a market specific thing. And there is one thing called a fractional stock play. So even if I have $10, I can buy a stock which is, let's say, worth $100. So that's something our markets can adopt. I think there is work going on to that aspect as well. But fractional equity would be a real good thing to have in India, especially considering our demographics and the kind of investments people can make on a monthly basis. Mutual fund is kind of an alias to that. But if it can happen in the stocks aspect, that would be good.

Utsav Somani: But I was reading Robinhood only as recently as last week allowed short selling. They've never allowed short selling on their platform. I'm not sure. Yeah, maybe. Why do you think that is the case or was the case?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): I think they did allow short selling long back and then they had halted it, right?

Utsav Somani: Okay, I have no idea because I read an announcement last week that Robinhood allows short selling now. So I don't know if it was maybe because of the GameStop drama, which I think happened probably.

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): Yeah, that's where I got to know that there was some pause for some time and now they might have continued. Not aware of this news.

Dhruv Sharma: Robinhood also took a conscious call itself to rebuild their business around the active trader, which was one set of users who didn't think of Robinhood as the first destination to go do what they wanted to do. Dhruv, how long has it been since you've been at IND? Is how you call the company?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): IND Money, yes.

Dhruv Sharma: How long has it been now since you've been there?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): I've been here for three and a half years now.

Dhruv Sharma: And so how many users existed when you came in? How has that growth journey been? And also from an engineering team standpoint, how large was the team when you joined? How has it changed over time?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): I think our team has grown only 2x. If I talk about only tech, there were, I think, 30-40 people when I had joined. Now, there would be around 110 people. User skill has gone 4x-5x, especially in the Indian equity part. Yeah, that's about it. We have stayed pretty lean. And now, especially in this year with all of these agentic AI IDs helping you out, the productivity does increase. I've noticed that it does increase with Cursor. And lately, we are also evaluating Antigravity, which Google launched last week.

Utsav Somani: Now, what are the tools that you're using apart from the ones that you mentioned? Anything else that you want to highlight on the show?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): So there are two aspects. One is internal usage of AI and, of course, the customer side usage of AI. In internal, we have made a few of our development processes agentic. So we are, let's say, a backend-driven frontend. We don't need to do a frontend release to change something in our app. It's done through backend. And that language in which the backend and frontend talk to that, it's now done by AI. So of course, you would have heard of Figma, right? Where we do our design. So that AI reads the Figma design and then creates the language which our mobile app would read. And all of that earlier used to take 5-6 hours for a developer. Now, it's a 10-minute job. That's the internal side of things. And of course, a very, very easy use case to solve is your data democratization, right? In AngelList also, you would be having lots of requirements of having this kind of report or that kind of analysis.

Utsav Somani: Actually, the engineer at AngelList India was from InMoney. Ishan.

Dhruv Sharma: Ishan, let's give him a shout out. Our engineering lead is ex-IND.

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): Okay. That's good to hear. So democratization of this sort of data access and report access is another thing. When it comes to the external thing where people are getting exposed to some AI interventions, first, of course, is our CX. That's our first entry point. So when you are talking about an issue you are facing and it is within the AI knowledge base, it solves the problem for you, majority of the times. And as I talked about a trading assistant and a financial assistant, you should try it out, especially for the trading part. It connects to the market data in real time. Suppose I was not using AI. What I would have needed is 5-6 charts, 2-3 screeners, and some sort of access to market data. I might have taken 15 or 20 minutes to come out with a trading strategy or an investment strategy. All of that now gets done within 2 minutes max. You just have to type what you want to do.

Dhruv Sharma: Very interesting. And we were talking about AI, Dhruv. So how do you encourage devs and even outside the engineering teams, encourage people in the company to adopt AI more often and in more interesting ways? Do you give them an experimental budget, for instance? How do you do that?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): So a budget is not a constraint for the kind of output AI gives. So we are very, very liberal with all sorts of licenses, whether it's JGPT or Anthropic or ID-based licenses. One thing that has helped... So tech and product are early adopters. Then there are certain other departments which do maybe have a resistance or lack of knowledge in that aspect. So a real good way for them to adopt AI is to solve one use case for them in front of them. And solving a use case using AI, let's say for a legal team or for a finance team, it's just a onehour job or a one-hour training. And then the exciting flywheel goes on. Now they keep on adopting it themselves. I'll give you one very good example. We recently had a hackathon earlier this year. And I've been part of hackathons as a mentor, as a participant for many, many years. What I observed was, let's say two, three years back, majority of the participants were tech people. So there would be a hackathon team. There would be 70-80% members of a tech team because they are the tech enablers of what you would build. There's a product person and there is a design person. Coming to this year, that has kind of... The boundary is dissolved. With AI being an enabler, there are fully non-tech teams executing an idea. I will not say a productionization level, but a reasonably running production prototype. That's good to see.

Utsav Somani: And let's do a mind-expanding exercise together for our listeners and for us also. So many wealth management apps are there. Where does it go from here? And especially for InMoney, what do you think is next?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): Oh, what I feel is, certain problems have been solved by everyone. And certain complex problems have not been solved by everyone. I'll take a few examples. Rebalancing is a problem which has not yet been solved in a really good way, especially automatic rebalancing. Another aspect which is very complex... What about the advisory model? Advisory model plus if it can take automated actions on your behalf as well. So we have simple automated actions. So SIP is an example of a simple automated action. You deduct this amount on first of every month and invest in this mutual fund. It's a very simple action. Slightly more complex would be step-up SIP. Next year, I would be getting an appraisal by 10%. So step up my SIP by 10% every month. Then it starts getting more complex. Whenever my debt-to-equity ratio changes this much, do this kind of switch, or always ensure my global equity ETF exposure is this much. People do that, but do that in a more of a DIY manner. The automation has not yet been cracked yet. So that's one problem to solve. And tax still remains very, very complex. So as we move up towards the tier earlier, there is a very easy DIY tax. Once you start investing, I would say it is still moderately easy. But beyond a layer, you have to go to a CA. And there too, you need to have few to-and-fro discussions to solve that problem. So personalized tax solving, because when you are managing wealth, tax would always be an outcome for the reporting purpose, you being compliant with the government, and secondly, for money-saving purpose as well. You can do things like tax harvesting. So I think that these two are real good problems to solve. What I feel is with advent of AI, you would not have to create a lot of tailor-made solutions for each of these problems. You feed the data to agents and sub-agents, and a lot of good work can be done by AI for these problems. So I think this year we'll see a lot of progress in both these aspects.

Dhruv Sharma: Dhruv, I'd love to understand, you said reporting, right? And you mentioned that a couple of times because it's so important. How do you internally make incremental improvements to the reporting? I'm an IND user, by the way, and I've seen a marked improvement over the years. And you also open access to some categories that are only available on IND. How do you think about reporting?

Utsav Somani: Let's talk about Dhruv's personal investing journey for a bit. What are you using IND for?

Dhruv Sharma: So the report I'm referring to is Schedule FA, for instance, if you use the 2 plus 1 module. And that's something you don't want to mess up, right? You don't want your accountant to mess up. So let's use that as an example. Dhruv, how do the reports keep getting better year on year on year?

Dhruv Pathak (Co-founder & CTO, INDmoney): So we have... So for reporting, you need two sorts of... Two, not two, three sorts of expertise. First is, of course, technical expertise to collate the data as accurately as you can, because you can't mess this up. There would be tax penalties on the person. Second is finance competence. And third is tax competence, right? So we have an internal board or let's say a set of people who are well-versed with ever-evolving tax rules, especially in the funds domain. Funds is the most complex one. When you go fund of fund, a fund having this much global equity exposure, a fund having more than this level of equity exposure, right? And these rules are really, really complex. So what we like to do is from the customer side, we think first is the report has to be accurate. And secondly, it has to be a point of least resistance while filing your tax. The end outcome of report is not some sort of charts I would want to build for myself or some sort of analysis I would want to do in a MCP server. The end outcome is either I would want to file my tax by myself or I would be collaborating with a CA to file my tax, right? So we try to bridge this collaboration as efficient as possible. So our report is very, very close to what you need to do for tax filing. That's why we consolidate it at all places. You don't need to go here and there. There's a specialized product called Tax Center, which I think you would have seen, which we launched this year. So everything, let's say you are into global equity, your Schedule FA and all of the 1042 forms are in a single place. Your Indian equity is in one place. Your FNO is in one place. Your mutual fund is in one place. Eventually, we will add things like tax harvesting opportunity and disallowed losses and all those things in the same report.

Utsav Somani: All right, Dhruv. I think that's a solid, solid note to end the segment on. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Really happy to be here. All right, listeners. We've spoken about wealth. Now our next guest will teach us how to spend it. Welcome to the show, Ashish.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): Thank you, Utsav.

Utsav Somani: Thank you, Dhruv. Hearing about SafeSage for the first time. Give us a two-minute download.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): It's a platform that enables you to get maximum value from your trade cuts and loyalty programs. In fact, when I heard Dhruv speak about tax harvesting and everything, I was just thinking I get more than 8% benefit when I pay my tax. And that's on top of anything and everything else, whether I pay GST, whether I pay income tax, whether I pay anything and everything. So SafeSage is a platform which enables you to get more value from your credit cards. All of us have seen those videos on social media where influencers talk about how they got a free flight, free hotel, free jewelry using nothing but their credit card reward points. We are the platform which makes all of it possible.

Utsav Somani: So try to convince me. I am basically, suppose I am, like, I mean, I'm just baffled on how much time people spend on optimizing a credit card spend versus trying to increase their income, right? On Twitter, you see these long threads where they spent, I don't know, I mean, trying, I mean, they've gotten free night in Vietnam or something like that just because they spent so much. But and then they'd list down the steps to get to that credit card point spent. Why should somebody be interested in this space? It's a very fascinating space. Like, I mean, there are dedicated Reddit communities and like WhatsApp groups that are trying to hack together the best ways to increase their earnings from these credit cards. But I mean, convince us.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): See, why should you have money on the table? It's free money, right? So when you're spending, if you're spending space for something else, if you're spending space for your vacation, why leave it on the table? It's no additional effort altogether. See, this is what we're trying to do. So you've answered it yourself. There's a lot of work which is required to be done if you have to get more value from the credit cards. But a layman doesn't do this because it's a lot of cognitive load. You really should be passionate about this. You should know what to do or not to do and then spend a lot of time and effort in doing it. So the idea behind SaveSage is very simple. Can there be an application which you can simply download and it can just guide you on the go what to do, what not to do. So it will tell you which is the right card for you based on what rewards you prefer, where you spend money, how much you spend, which categories, which merchants, how many times would you be needing domestic launch access, international launch access. Then it tells you how to use the card on a day-in-day-out basis. What are the offers going on? Where can you get a multiplier? Where can you not get multiplier? What are the benefits on your card? Thirdly, how to redeem your reward points in the right manner. For example, a card like HTLC Infinia which I'm assuming a lot of your viewers would be having. It has more than 50 different redemption options. I know people who do nothing but simply redeem their points for maybe cashback or even let the points expire. Now there are many other options where you can actually get 3x or 4x the value. In fact, Infinia is not even the best card out there. There are many cards which are much better than Infinia. So by simply replacing your card, one card by another card, your return on your expenses can go up 3x, 4x even more. By simply replacing one redemption option with another, your redemption benefits can go up 3x, 4x. So see, you can easily get more than 10% benefit on all your expense put together, which all of us are living on the table. If you're not...

Utsav Somani: So suppose you're saying that if somebody spends 50,000 rupees a month, 10% means they can get up to 5,000 rupees of that.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): Easily. For example, if you're talking about 50,000 on a monthly basis, there is an American Express card where you spend only 4 lakh rupees annually and get benefits with more than 12%. You get 10,000 rupees Taj Voucher, you get 48,000 minimum points in Marriott, which is good enough for two or three nights in a good Marriott property. So that's spending 4 lakh rupees, maybe paying your electricity bill and doing nothing else in that place for your vacation. I mean, and that is something people don't even know about.

Dhruv Sharma: So Ashish, do you think it's like... Do you think the thing to solve for is... Or do you think the problem is intent or information? Because to me, it appears that people who have strong intent, they know where to go find the information and they act on that information. In fact, they make it appear effortless. They always know where to snag the best deal.

Utsav Somani: Do you use credit card points?

Dhruv Sharma: You're asking me?

Dhruv Sharma: When I use credit cards, I don't necessarily use the points as much. I mean, they accumulate. I would keep them for a future point in time.

Utsav Somani: But I did get... I mean, my weekend trip was actually financed by Infinia SmartPay, Ashish. So I do use credit card points, but not the intensity that maybe some of the more active credit card community...

Dhruv Sharma: I was also wondering when you were asking that question, so it might just be a stage of life kind of thing. Like, you know, so I don't know. Maybe let's hear Ashish's thoughts on that.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): It's an intent and it's a question of intent. Of course, it's a question of convenience because you may have the right intent that you want to go and optimize your cards, but probably it's not convenient enough, right? So today you probably have to go to social media, go through lots and lots of content. You should know what you need to search for, then go through the content, make sense of it, take a lot of cognitive load in making a strategy for yourself and keep repeating the process every few weeks, if not more frequently. So that's a lot of effort. Thirdly, it's also a question of capability. Now, someone may be a very good investor, may be a very good techie, but when it comes to putting OnePlus One together, making it 11 from a credit card optimization perspective, you may not be able to do this. So it's an intent, convenience and capability.

Dhruv Sharma: Would you say it's also like the problems are getting people to pick the right card, then accumulate value, then redeem that value most effectively? Is it kind of like that?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): Yes. In fact, even beyond that, right? So one is you talk about credit cards. So picking the right card, using it in the right manner, redeeming your credit card points in the right manner, but it goes beyond that because majority of the benefit, you get maximum value when you transfer your loyalty program, your credit card points to a travel loyalty program, which may be an airline or hotel. Now, it's also about how to redeem those points in the right manner, because a lot of times you may have some bonuses, something or the other. You may have some, for example, Marriott. Now, you can redeem a Marriott point where you're getting point value of 15 paise, Indian paise, to up to more than 4 rupees, 4 Indian rupees, right? So what is the right value? How can you really go about doing this? So when you put all the four things together, you can actually get a lot of value. And to answer your earlier point about are people really keen on doing this? If you can answer, if you can solve for intent, intent is always there. In fact, just to share with you guys, you have five Forbes billionaires. These are people, some of them are worth more than $5 billion. And they spend good amount of time in doing this with us. And they were not doing this. In fact, there's a user who came to us.

Utsav Somani: That's a fascinating stat for me personally. Dhruv, are you surprised by that?

Dhruv Sharma: You know, frankly, I'm not. I once even heard Navroze say this somewhere. Navroze Udbadia. That he never leaves value in the table. He'll get, I mean, he doesn't have to, but he'll get in a cab and he'll always, you know, he'll have the best fare. Like winning, I guess. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. I think it's more than the money. I think it's just like the heart of like, yeah.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): Why pay for it? So we have a user who came to us and the person had literally two and a half crore worth of reward points lying around in loyalty and in credit cards. Because the person has dual cards, India, US, MX, which never expire. The top cards in India, black card, this and that. And they've been spending a lot of money. And when we actually went through the profile, like two and a half crores is what our estimate was. And now the person hasn't paid for anything in more than one and a half years now. All their first class flights and everything. So the point I'm trying to make is intent is always there. No matter who you are, people love to save money. No one wants to leave money on the table. It's not about the money. It's about the gratification that I did not pay for my business class flights. I did not pay for my hotels or all of that.

Utsav Somani: Also, it's a cat and a mouse game, right? I mean, like that Leonardo DiCaprio, the departed movie where they also try to close the loopholes where I think access was devaluing a lot of coins and a lot of hue and cry about Magnus, I think on Twitter, right? Where? So, I mean, it's a, I mean, things are ongoing. It's a game.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): That's exactly why people don't do this, right? So, and that is where platforms like Savesage come in because then it comes to point number two and the convenience and capability. Now, even if you do something right now because there's a change in TNC and then maybe there's a new card in the market. Maybe there's a devaluation or revaluation. So you do not know what to do now. So the more there's a change in TNC, the more automation you need in the entire process. And that is where we come in so that you don't have to spend time and effort. You simply go to the platform. You have paid the fee. There's a change in, for example, the points you get on the fee, right? So we have it all covered and we'll tell you whether you should be doing A or B or C. And this is what we are solving for. It's an end-to-end platform, right? So unfortunately, all the legacy platforms in India, they focused only on bill payments. Now, bill payments is less than 5% of what you do when it comes to your credit cards. But let me give you an analogy. So when you have to go out for food, right? So how do you decide? You decide what cuisine you want to have, whether it's South Indian, North Indian, Italian, then this is that you decide the restaurant that you want to go to. Then you go to the restaurant. Then you see the menu. You decide what you want to order. You get the food. You enjoy the food. You probably avail an offer, maybe Easy9 or Swiggy or something. And then finally, you make the payment. Now, all the platforms in the market are focusing only on payments right now. Whereas when it comes to experience, you need someone to solve for the entire chain, which is the right card for me. How should I use the card? How should I redeem my points? What should I do with my FFP? Can I talk to an expert? We have more than 500 people who bought cars in the last seven months by talking to us because, you know, buying a car is a big purchase. If you can get some points out of it, why not? More than 50 people plan their weddings. In fact, we did a campaign where we spoke about let your wedding pay for your honeymoon because it's a big expense.

Dhruv Sharma: Let's ask Ashish a few fun questions. What are the most bizarre things, people you've seen charging their card?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): So, bizarrely, I think people don't share with us.

Dhruv Sharma: But a wedding you've heard.

Utsav Somani: Even a wedding is fascinating to me because, I mean, the one stat that came out, like I think somebody posted about it, some financial influencer on Twitter said that unpaid credit card bills are up 44%. Like 33,000 crores in March 2025. Oh, that is crazy. We're like, I mean, heading towards a debt disaster.

Dhruv Sharma: You know, so I want to ask the question here, Ashish. And this is maybe one of the most serious questions we'd ask you. For the issuers, is this a profit center or is this a loss leader and they get to develop, you know, monetize the relationship through other means?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): No, no, so it's a loss center. And that's why there's always been a lot of friction between redemptions. So if all, for example, you spoke about Infinia, right? So it serves as an Infinia card. So if all the people who are getting Infinia points, if all those people, they go out and they begin to redeem it for the best possible option, the bank would be, they'll probably go out of business. So the hook is you either make money by cross-selling. So maybe Infinia is a premium card. So they make money by other products. Secondly, they rely a lot on people not redeeming their points. So points expiring or simply not being redeemed. Third, people redeeming their points for a lesser rewarding option. So for example, I know people who have an Infinia who, so I know people, for example, some of our users, they were redeeming lakhs and lakhs of points for cashback, which is 30 paise per point. Whereas a straight booking will get you 1 rupee per point. So that's less than one third the value, right? So bank is absolutely happy if you're doing so.

Utsav Somani: And this one, I mean, comes to the bank, like, I mean, there are two immediate sources of income on this are the MDR and the revolving interest, right? That's, I mean, some people might get interest on very high rates as well. Yes.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): So people are in a way subsidizing folks who optimize their credit cards, if you ask me. So if you go to Amazon, a person who pays in cash or a person who pays using UPI or any other mean is actually subsidizing a person who is paying using their cards. Similarly, even within people, all the people who use the cards to pay for things, a person who is not using their reward points or redeeming their reward points effectively versus a person who is doing so effectively.

Utsav Somani: How many? I mean, if you were to get a sense of the scale of Indian online e-commerce market, like how many unique credit card holders are there? If you have some idea.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): I'll tell you. So as of end of September, there are 11.33 crore credit cards in India. These are active cards. Total, but somebody might have five, somebody might have one. So a safe number to assume is one and a half credit cards per person in India. So that comes to about 75 million unique credit card holders in India. Now, if you compare this with the US, Indian credit card penetration would be about five and a half to six percent. You compare this with the US, which is about 70 plus percent, and China is about more than 40 percent penetration. So one very few people in India have credit card. That's point number one. So more and more people are getting cards. Secondly, more and more people are getting multiple credit cards. So if you look at the US market, per capita credit card is 3.8. In India, per capita card is 0.08. So US is more than almost 40 times the India market. So more and more people are getting cards. More and more people are getting multiple cards. Secondly, if you look at spends on the credit card, last year we spent about 21 lakh crores on credit cards. And this is only going up. Thirdly, which is a big mover going ahead, eventually in two years from now, every credit card in India would either have a UPI variant because either Rupee would be allowed to issue a card of the same variant or Visa, Mastercard and all the global companies would also be allowed to issue a UPI variant card. But what it would effectively do is that you would have the power of credit cards and the convenience of UPI. So this space would only explode. And there is a PWC research as well, which says that all the numbers when it comes to credit cards in India will literally double in three years. So you would have more than 150 million unique credit card holders in India. More and more people would have cards. So all the numbers will literally double in three years. So this is an opportunity. Now, there is no layer. So think of Google. Google has very few websites of its own, but what it really does, it's the layer between user and the millions of websites out there really telling you what is best for you, picking all the content. We are the layer between you and all this more than thousand different cards being issued in India. The THDs, the offers, everything. So we are that layer helping you get more from your credit cards and travel loyalty programs.

Utsav Somani: For a bank, I think it makes sense. Like having a credit card because it's part of a portfolio. But for a fintech like Cred, I think they recently had a big event where they're trying to do this gold card, like 10,000 in number. Like, what does it make? How does it make sense for them? Because they already have a separate lending arm anyway, right?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): See, there's a difference between lending and card. So folks like you and me, we may not really be keen on getting a personal loan, but you would very much be open to getting it.

Utsav Somani: I mean, the figure that I'm getting at is the 2% MDR or whatever. It's not going to be significant enough for Cred. So is there a different play that they're trying to do by launching credit cards?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): See, it's a volume game. Because when I say, so we did a research, we did some numbers. So last year when you talk, and I keep talking to lots of bankers, so just to give you a sense of the numbers, at 21,000 crores last year, 21 lakh crores last year, the MDR comes to almost more than 30,000 crores. So big profit basically. And this is only from an MDR perspective. And then we did some numbers about the reward points as well. So generally, on an average, at an industry level, a bank would be spending about 75 to 80 bps on reward points. And this is what they're spending. But what you are earning as a user would be upwards of 1.2 to 1.3%. So there is a gap of almost 50 bps that is expiring each year. Now that comes to more than 10,000 crores worth of reward points expiring only on credit cards in India. And that's a big opportunity which people are not even thinking about. Now for someone like Credit, of course, they want to get into products. This is where we are differentiating assets, where we do not talk about products. I'm not saying... If I have my own credit card, then I'll always be... I'll always push my own product. This is the best way. But it may not be the best product for you. So I want to be... This is where I was giving the Google example that if Google gets into everything, then they won't be able to tell you which is the right place for you to go and get that information.

Utsav Somani: But in a neutral platform, so you don't charge anything from the banks? Like they can't push you towards or give you a commission like a mutual fund distributor to sell their product?

Utsav Somani: So we give you what is relevant right for you. Okay. And you didn't answer the top three bizarre spends that Dhruv asked. So... Expand our minds. Tell us like what crazy thing Dhruv should buy this weekend.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): No. So we keep getting calls from people. So when someone was at a Rolex showroom, he wanted to buy a watch for 40 lakh rupees and then he called us up, which card should I use? And so then, of course, once we had a Bollywood celebrity not naming the person, so had been a user for a month and he scheduled a session with one of our relationship managers and the person literally fell off the chair. He saw the person come on and then he had his EA and then this guy's like don't tell anyone that I optimize because he puts those reels on social media.

Utsav Somani: So those kind of bizarre things keep happening. People want to keep it a secret like they're not spending time on that. Maybe Dhruv and I are secret credit card junkies on Reddit also. But so what is your personal stack of cards?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): Oh, see, it's a profession for me. So I have more than 15 cards. I've got everything from an Infiniia II, EPM from Isis, a bank premium from HSBC, Magnus Burgundy. I haven't paid for travel in more than 8-9 years. So that's more than 450 flights, more than 100 hotel nights, more than 15 lakh rupees worth of jewelry using only credit card points.

Dhruv Sharma: This is the most unique pitch I've ever heard, not that you're pitching, Ashish, but if you were to, I think.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, honestly, you should have started with this. Like you basically, you've not spent on travel in the last 8 years, like sold.

Dhruv Sharma: And maybe a good question to ask, Ashish, would be if people were to accomplish what you have, why don't you leave that as a parting thought, right? With people across different income segments without being hyper optimizers, how can they use this to their advantage?

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): See, 10-15% is very much possible. So if you are an entry level, someone who spends 4-6 lakh rupees, there are multiple cards. I already spoke about American Express, Platinum Travel Card. There are a couple of cards which can easily give you 10-15%. This is only by using one card. So you don't have to be a hyper optimizer. The higher you move up the chain, the more access you have to premium cards. There are ways you can earn a lot. Personally, for me, I've got 23% return on all my expenses last year. Even fixed income insurance and tax, for example. So when I pay tax, I get 7-8%. I already spoke about that.

Utsav Somani: And the returns are insane. Launch a fund where people can get 23% tracking Ashish's credit card spends and collateralize it, basically.

Ashish Lath (Founder & CEO, SaveSage): Yeah, I mean, see, with more and more awareness, people are actually getting into this. It's been a big industry in the US, but there was no product. But when you put AI offline and everything put together, it becomes a big opportunity and big saving for anyone, right? So just to give you an idea, bizarrely, so I'll give you something that I have done. So I have a young baby. So when the baby was born, we decided we have to put some money away in fixed income. Now the first choice will be you put an FD. FD gave us 7% at that point in time. So we decided rather than take an FD, we will probably put the money in a fixed guaranteed income plan, which gave us 7.2%. So we were already making more money. Now the premium which we have, plus we got insurance risk cover. So that goes to 7.2 to probably 8-9% because you have the additional risk cover. Then you have the income tax benefit because you don't really have to pay tax on whatever. And then finally, the premium which we pay, I optimize it using various cards in multiple ways. I end up getting more than 13% benefit in terms of credit card. So then eventually it's more than 20% guaranteed. So the policies end up paying for some vacations.

Utsav Somani: All right, folks. I think that's a solid note to end on. None of this is financial advice, but log in to SaveSage and talk to Ashish and his team to learn more on how to do some of this credit card hacking. Thanks so much Ashish for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you. Nice chatting with you.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners. That's it from today. On Friday, we're doing a very special stream. We spent time at the UAE India startup series yesterday and we interacted with the finalist and other 15 founders who were coming and pitching at that event. So there was a total of 20 startup founders that we've interacted with. And you'll see the episode go live on Friday. And then of course, a longer clip from us with the 15 interviews that we've done with the other founders. All exciting companies. Somebody's doing exciting social ventures, social impact ventures in packaging. Somebody's doing hydroponic farming. There is a space company. There's a logistics company. There's like AI robotics. So all kinds of exciting companies. And yeah, do tune in and give us your feedback as well. And of course, the new Christmas theme is live as well. So keep us posted in the community if you like all of this. Cheers. Bye-bye.