Paytm was India’s first digital wallet service provider. It revolutionized the country’s digital payments landscape, but it was slow to adopt Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments. The entry of WhatsApp into the digital payments industry on November 6, 2020 intensified the competition in the UPI segment of the market that Google Pay and PhonePe already dominated by focusing on person-to-person (P2P) transactions. With a strong 400-million user .....more

In April 2020, the head of the corporate social investments (CSI) division of Investec South Africa (Investec SA), was working to ensure that Investec SA CSI could continue to create opportunities for young people to become active economic participants in society while it also salvaged the school year for students already enrolled in its flagship education program, Promaths. To save the school year, he would have to shift the entire curriculum online, .....more

In August 2021, uTrade Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (uTrade) was considering various options for its future. The financial technologies (fintech) company was founded in 2011 and based in Mohali, India. By 2021, uTrade had become a trusted state-of-the-art technology solutions provider to India’s major stockbrokerage firms. However, the changing market landscape, declining brokerage margins, and market disruption by discount brokers were creating challenges .....more

In June 2020, the head of Customer Centre at DBS Bank Ltd. (DBS), the largest commercial bank in Singapore, was wondering how to leverage the bank’s current success in digitalization to create a competitive advantage. As a business leader, she was facing major decision points. How could she increase awareness of the bank’s digital assets among existing customers? How could she further digitalize the customer centre? In addition, the COVID-19 global .....more

In 2016, Pythagoras Global Fund (Pythagoras), based in the United Kingdom, decided to launch a fund focused on emerging markets, especially those in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC countries). Pythagoras’s fund manager favoured investing in family-owned businesses, but the investment opportunities in India used ownership structures different than those used in developed markets. The structures in Indian groups altered the cash flow and effective .....more

After Wirecard AG (Wirecard) collapsed in 2020, the financial technology (fintech) company, revealed as an elaborate fraud, came to be known as Germany’s Enron as investigators confirmed many of the concerns that had been raised by whistle-blowers and journalists. For instance, they confirmed that the company was using round-tripping to inflate revenues and that escrow accounts in Southeast Asia did not exist. Auditors had raised concerns for years, .....more

The program head for retail talent acquisition at Yes Bank Limited needed to improve the talent acquisition process to fill vacant positions for relationship managers—a critical position within the business unit. Competition for talent was severe, with multiple positions at competing organizations open to suitable candidates, and screening the necessary number of candidates to ensure recruitment success was time-consuming and frustrating for everyone .....more

In 2017, Total Credit Recovery Limited (TCR), an accounts receivables management and debt collection firm, hired a data scientist to analyze the firm’s current data analytics practices and create a plan to extend the use of its data. TCR collected more than 1 million points of data per day, and the company’s new data scientist knew that with a proper team in place, he could use this data to offer his firm a competitive advantage that was currently .....more

LenDenClub (LDC) was a primarily online platform operated by Innofin Solutions Pvt. Ltd. in the peer-to-peer lending industry in India. To offer differentiated products in a growing segment, LDC decided to focus on the untapped segment of low-salary earners. However, it was risky to serve this segment; borrowers had little credit history but often required loans immediately for emergency expenditures, and these borrowers had limited repayment capacity, .....more

HSBC Commercial Banking was a key business for HSBC Holdings plc, contributing one-third of the bank’s profit in 2019. In 2016, the regional head of Commercial Banking, Asia Pacific, began initiating a series of open innovation programs in Hong Kong. The programs aimed to embrace collaboration in the innovation and technology ecosystem to co-create value for Commercial Banking’s small and medium-sized customers.Now, in 2020, the regional head of Commercial .....more