The 100th Unicorn Fintechs like OPEN work in conjunction with the traditional banking structure, as they are always going to be the catalysts that lead the way towards making banking more inclusive and reaching out to groups who aren't actively served by the traditional players.

In 2017, Mabel Chacko, Anish Achuthan, Ajeesh Achuthan and Deena Jacob started OPEN to cater to the needs of small businesses. During Anish's previous journeys as a fintech entrepreneur, he had the opportunity to interact with a sizable number of entrepreneurs and SME business owners. While banks have dedicated teams catering to the needs of larger enterprises with deeper pockets, the needs of small businesses, which have evolving business models, are often not catered to and can also be very costly. These small businesses, who want to do things like bulk payouts to vendors, process salaries to their employees, or settle expenses from a workrelated trip, would spend hours in a day just trying to track and reconcile payments. Not just these, but businesses were using multiple tools to manage their expenses, payroll, tax payments, etc., but they were all disjointed from the bank account. Anish wanted to solve this through neobanking because ultimately it was the bank account where all the money inflow and outflow happens. His idea was to integrate the banking layer with all the tools that a business needs to manage their finances.

Talking about the various features of the platform, Anish Achuthan Co-founder & CEO, OPEN Financial Technologies says, "We are the only platform that has such a variety of business finance tools like payments, accounting, taxes, expense management, and payroll integrated into one place and linked to the bank account." With the current revenue growth achieved for OPEN and lending products scaling up well, OPEN aims to attain profitability in the next 18-20 months.

Fintechs like OPEN work in conjunction with the traditional banking structure, as they are always going to be the catalysts that lead the way towards making banking more inclusive and reaching out to groups who aren't actively served by the traditional players. By creating alternative underwriting models and assessment techniques, fintechs like OPEN can act as the stream that takes banks closer to the underserved communities while also bridging the gap for segments like MSMEs to access services like credit, current accounts, etc.

FACTSHEET:

Amount of funding received- USD 190 million
Year of inception- 2017
Number of employees- 500 +
No. of clients- 35 Lakh+ Indian Businesses
Current Turnover- Rs 40.9 Crores