Building India's 2.0: PayNearby

Headquartered in Mumbai, India, FinTech startup Nearby Technologies has seen its flagship brand, PayNearby, rapidly flourish across most of its target market within just four years. The unprecedented success of its payment app, which allows users to access banking services and send money throughout the country from the comfort of their local grocer, has meant success not just for CEO Anand Kumar Bajaj. It has given the massively underbanked population a new lease on financial inclusion. However, as the company celebrates the milestone of covering six times as many locations as brick-and-mortar bank branches in the country, Bajaj looks on to the company’s growing obstacles beyond 2020. PayNearby’s wide spread means that the company lives and dies on a mere five basis points, and their competitors now number over 200. If Bajaj is to continue the success of his young company, and to continue serving the people who have come to depend on his service for their livelihoods, he will have to see that the thin “pizza-dough” strategy he has implemented can rise with a suite of new services. Failing to do so will spell the eventual demise of his vision. What will those services will be? How will Bajaj be able to secure his company’s long-term niche against the hordes of competitors who are now rising at the hands of the same type of innovation his own company had employed?