Abstract

The case is about the journey of FamPay, a Fintech startup based in Bengaluru, India, in enabling teens to be a part of the digital payment ecosystem in India. FamPay was started by two young engineering graduates from IIT Roorkee in 2019. They started with a mobile app to reduce food wastage in canteens and went on to build a startup whose focus would be on creating a platform for teenagers to spend money under the guidance of their parents, and facilitate cashless transactions in both the offline and online mode. The case talks about how the founders identified a problem before embarking on their entrepreneurial journey and how they secured seed funding to develop an engineering team and technology. The case also covers in detail the digital payment solutions for pre-banked teenagers that FamPay offered. The FamPay App was a family-oriented digital payments app using which parents could transfer money to their children and teenagers could spend money under their parents’ supervision. Similar to Venmo, a startup mobile payment service in the US, the FamPay app had a social feed for teenagers to share their spend details with friends and comment on updates. It also used gamification for making money management fun. The FamPay app quickly became popular with both teenagers and their parents. It got good reviews and had hit 100,000+ installations till October 2020. Riding high on the success of the FamPay app, the company launched the FamPay Numberless Card in July 2020 in partnership with IDFC First Bank. This card was accepted across the RuPay payment network of merchants. Teenagers could use it as a debit card without having a bank account. All card related data was stored on the app and security features such as fingerprint, face ID, or PIN could be used to protect any transaction done with the card. The founders claimed that what differentiated the FamPay Card from the cards offered by other players, especially banks, was its technology edge. In future, FamPay wanted to go beyond FamCard and define the teens’ journey in payments and finance. It aimed to become the de facto platform for teens and their families in managing all payments and financial management.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand the process of becoming an entrepreneur
• Understand the process of idea generation and validation
• Understand the process of funding a venture
• Understand the challenges and opportunities in making teenagers part of the digital payment ecosystem in India
• Understand how a Fintech start-up offers unique products and services

Keywords

Fintech; Digital; Digital Payments; Digital Ecosystem; Financial Management; Entrepreneurship; Idea Validation; Startup; Idea Generation; Entrepreneurship Development; Venture Capitalists; Market Research; Product Development; Fintech Startup; Digital Payment Ecosystem