Atoms Founder Stories 009: Meet Jify
Anisha Aibara started to work on the idea for Jify by herself.
She had seen similar business models and problem statements play out in the UK over a period of time. Through a common friend, she happened to meet her cofounder Anusha Ramakrishnan who equally resonated with the slew of problem statements the startup was being envisioned upon. The duo got together to start Jify last year out of Mumbai.
The hypothesis at Jify is that the current market in today’s world has a slew of financial products for savings, credit, money management and wealth-making but this segment is heavily under-serving a particular category of the market: grey-collar workforce, lower-income white-collar workforce and those who did not have the opportunity to get access to any sort of financial education in their lives.
“These employees never knew how to engage with any financial products and India’s belly lies within this target market. When we asked ourselves what tools does this category of workforce use to grow their wealth, the answer was simple: Fixed deposits and Current accounts.” Anisha Aibara
Finance in itself is a very sensitive topic for most of this target audience, and Jify had to do the heavy-lifting of establishing and winning the right level of trust with these workers as well.
As for the hypothesis, the founders Anisha and Anusha feel that the starting point towards approaching this whole problem statement itself has been very wrong. It should have been access to the right financial tools. Anisha adds that most of these consumers today have shorter-term liquidity requirements leading to high-cost credit and loans. As a result, it leads to unnecessary financial leakage in their monthly income, which often goes up to 3-4% or sometimes even 6%.
Some rethinking has gone into the entire problem statement with an insight that everything in the book has been tried so far, but only keeping consumer credit risk in mind. With lower CIBIL scores, banks would underwrite these employees and seeking additional capital meant going through multiple other agencies for approvals.
What if this market segment got access to their credits and loans at the cheapest rates possible?
The 3-6% leakage would then become a part of their savings without much hassle. So the entire idea was around building a platform and a product that would solve the above problem statements and yet, also make enough money as a business. That was how Mumbai-based Jify found its inception.
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Please note that we will be closing applications on March 15th, 2022. Applications arriving after this date will only be considered for the cohort after.
