Banking From The Grocery Store
Mahagram is a fintech company that has enabled banking from the mom-and-pop store round the corner through fintech solutions. The company’s mission is to enable rural women to save money at the local kirana (or grocery) stores, instead of travelling miles to the nearest bank branch.
Through the pandemic and the lockdowns that it mandated, grocery stores qualified as essential services, enabling Mahagram to offer undeterred services to its clientele. “The business wasn’t affected, instead it has grown three times for us in the last two years,” said Mahagram CEO, Ram Shriram.
“The challenge was to retain talent, as during the pandemic people migrated to their hometowns,” recalled Shriram. Policies on data privacy and servers for financial technology posed a challenge too for remote working during the pandemic and the lockdowns that came in its wake. “We had to keep offices open and wanted people to come to the office because making systems accessible from different IP addresses was difficult logistically and as per the legal guidelines as well,” said Shriram.
Established in June 2015, Mahagram is already a well-recognised rural fintech company. A team of former bankers, payment professionals, marketers and developers came together then to create solutions that everyone could use with ease. The company’s vision is to make India, especially rural India, free from the cumbersome paperwork that banking involves and make fintech ubiquitous around the country.
Based in Mumbai, Mahagram now has a presence in almost all Indian states. It is building scalable solutions to grow its market and to enable its customers to send, deposit, and withdraw money from the nearest grocery (kirana) stores.
Speaking of the challenges of the Covid-stricken times, Shriram pointed out that many industries had collapsed since the pandemic broke out, leaving droves of people without jobs. These people will now have to take on new career streams and re-establish themselves. Businesses that do not opt for updated technology integration would have to encounter numerous challenges to compete in the market. “I would say, instead of mindset change it is more about prioritising upskilling yourself for the upcoming challenges,” said Shriram.
Since its inception, Mahagram has been organically funded by its core promoters and stakeholders. Mahagram services nearly 8000 PIN codes and provides basic banking, eGovernance and other BFSI services through its distribution network of around 5,000 distributors and over 2,00,000 retail partners among the mom-and-pop stores.
Shriram sees a similarity between the situation that prevails today and the 2008 recession. He feels that India lags behind in terms of household savings. Mahagram aims to increase the ratio and habit of household savings in rural India. “At Mahagram, we are indulged in offering basic banking services like deposit and withdrawing transactions to consumers but it is now high time for rural people to save money,” said Shriram.
Financial literacy and financial accessibility will grow exponentially as the fintech sector in India grows and witnesses massive innovations. Mahagram’s CEO believes that in the post Covid era, people have turned serious about a second source of income. They realise that they need to put their savings into the right investment solutions. “We are focusing on rural women because they are the ones who run households. We are offering them the recurring deposit,” he said, sharing his vision for 2022.
