Innovators Playground by NPCI

In this episode of Innovators Playground, Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO, NPCI, sits down with Rajan Bajaj, Founder and ED, slice, for a candid conversation on how a fintech company is rethinking banking itself, from core technology and credit models to AI, UPI, and population scale design.
 
Here is what the episode dives into:
 
What it means to build a banking stack in house:
A rare inside look at why slice chose to build its core banking stack in house, how microservices change speed, resilience, and cost economics, and what traditional banks underestimate when they rely on monolithic systems

Why building for the first time users creates the best bank for everyone: How designing credit, onboarding, and risk systems for first time and small ticket users forces fundamentally better product, underwriting, and automation decisions that scale effortlessly to mainstream and affluent users as well
 
How Credit via UPI is converging into a new financial primitive:
Why Credit card on UPI is not just a new feature but a structural shift in how India will distribute credit, reduce acquisition costs, expand merchant acceptance, and bring hundreds of millions into formal credit for the first time
 
Where AI actually matters in banking at scale:
Beyond hype, how AI is already replacing large parts of operations, risk checks, customer service, and repayments, and why voice led, multilingual, AI driven interfaces will define the next phase of banking for India

🎧 A must listen for engineers, product leaders, and fintech founders building for India’s next decade of growth.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this channel by the host and guests are for informational and entertainment purposes only, and do not constitute professional advice. The content provided does not claim to be exhaustive and does not cover all aspects of the topic discussed. Host and Guests do not necessarily subscribe the opinions expressed. Viewers are advised to conduct their own research and seek professional guidance for any specific concerns or questions.

What is Innovators Playground by NPCI?

‘Innovators Playground’ is a podcast series where we explore the cutting-edge innovations and insights shaping the future of technology. It brings conversations with leading founders, industry experts, and thinkers to inspire and inform youth around the world.

DILIP
Welcome to NPCI's Innovators Playground Podcast. We are doing this podcast for budding engineers who would get inspired to build for India. And I believe that there is so much to be done. There are so many opportunities, there are so many unsolved problems which as a country we have. And I believe that this podcast will give inspiration to all those engineers to work towards, contribute and solve the problems that we have. I am happy to welcome our guest today in the podcast, Mr. Rajan Bajaj, who is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur and is building India's one of the best digital banks, Slice. And he has been doing this for the last 9 years. Recently he has got a bank with him and for next few years he is going to make this as one of India's best and most loved digital bank.
Hi Rajan, thank you so much for agreeing to participate in NPCI's Innovators Playground Podcast. You have been building Slice for the last 9 years now. And what has kept you going in this whole journey of the last 9 years.

RAJAN
Thank you so much for having me, Dilip. It's a deeply personal problem for me. When I was in college back in 2011-12, I used to play a lot of basketball. I always wanted to buy a Nike shoe but was always ending up buying a Reebok shoe or an Adidas shoe because that's what the pocket money I was getting for buying the shoe. But I had some extra pocket money for my regular expenses and I could always see that I can spend that 1000 rupees extra every month, get an upgraded shoe and pay in instalments over 3 months, 4 months. But no one really wanted to give an instalment based product to me. But once I got a credit card, I saw that I understood how it works, what are the interests, what are the free credit period. I started understanding more about finance from that. And that was a pretty interesting learning curve for me. I thought in college everyone thinks you know everything about everything. So that was like the first real learning for me in the working world. Like this is how credit works, this is how some of the things in the economy work. And then when I started my first startup, it was a rental startup. We were giving these furniture and appliances on instalments to people. They can just pay on rent, it was not even instalment. They can pay over 4 years, 5 years also for rental. But we expected people will just rent for 6 months or 3 months. There were some people and a good amount of people, 20-30% who were renting for like, they were very clear they'll keep renting for 4 years, 5 years. An effective IRR for them will be very high if you keep renting for so long. We were like why are you going to rent for so long when we realised these people also don't have access to credit. So, we started by solving for these people whom we thought are like us. But they are on the fringes of getting approved for our transactional credit product. And there were like tens of millions of them that we could foresee, and we later realised there are probably hundreds of millions of them now. And if we don't solve for these people to get credit, then they will always be outside of our formal credit economy. So, when we realised later and we can talk about it more, by solving for these people, we just didn't solve for these people. We brought the cost down to a level, we made the products so great because we wanted viral distribution instead of acquiring them at a large cost. We brought the risk to a level where we are underwriting them on their spends based patterns, which was equally applicable for the regular people who were getting access to credit from the formal system. Like the 40-50 million people who have access to credit cards or UPI credit cards now. They also benefit a lot from what we have built for these other 150-200 million people who don't have access to formal credit systems. And now it's very personal for us to be able to build a great bank for them, the most loved bank in the country for them.

DILIP
The gap which you saw then with yourself, very interesting to see then how you could actually created a vision out of it. I think it's fabulous and I think the country is blessed to have people like you who are able to spot these gaps and actually create an institution to fill in that gap or at least go closer to bridge that gap. Rajan, I think you have been a fintech founder, now you are turning up as a banker. How do you think this is going to be different? Or you just built a bank like fintech or the canvas India is such a large market. While we have done so much thanks to the government, thanks to the RBI, we have done so much in financial services, but still there is 10x more to be done. So how do you see the fintech role, the bank role and what's your vision on, how do you want to design your bank?

RAJAN
First of all, I would like to start by thanking you. Since you asked this question and the stabilising forces in our country and the innovating forces in our country on a platform level that are allowing to have these things even happen in a country like ours at this scale, NPCI, RBI, government, the forward-looking thinking of building an Aadhaar, building the UPI stack, building India stack. What you are doing as institutions for some of us who are building companies is the reason we are able to think about growth and building better products compared to the rest of the world. I think the same function banks play in regular customers like they are these stabilising forces, they are these economically super important instruments for our country without which the growth doesn't happen.

To give you an example, we were at this hotel and then the waitress came and asked us for the bill and I am paying from my slice card and she is asking me how did you get this card? I also applied for it, I didn't get approved for this card, I really wanted this card for myself. She said something very interesting, she said someone has to build these products for people like us also and the reason that's very important is this is not just about that they can do their education payments or they can do their emergency or their regular lifestyle payments but when they get into a regular credit usage in a formal credit system, when they are getting their next home loan or next car loan 5 years later, 10 years later or a business loan for that matter, that rate is little lower, the ability for them to get approved from a financial system is higher, because they have built a history for themselves and that is life-changing for them.

DILIP
India still has a huge scope for everybody but I think more so for the people who are in the fringe zone and the people who are on the edge, that's a complex job. We spoke about your role in transitioning from a fintech company to a bank. Banks are like a backbone of the country's economy, the growth drivers and the country is as strong as their banks are. While you create Slice bank and while you spoke about the fringe section but you still have to create and that's a challenge for the large banks as well. Right from the HNI, Super HNI to the last mile, it's going to be such a big stretch you are going to serve. So how are you designing your technology stack which will be able to do this? The world is changing so fast. How are you kind of handling this aspect of providing that benefit to all sections in such a simple and secure manner?

RAJAN
First of all, these fringes are not fringes anymore. We started by thinking they are fringes. We also realised much later that it's not like just 10 million more customers. Actually now 300 million people who are eligible for credit in India are potentially.

DILIP
Actually I used the word half a billion, that's my idea.

RAJAN
That may be the future in the next 10 years. So there's just 40 to 50 million people who are using transactional credit like credit card kind of products regularly and UPI credit card completely changes that in a big way. In order to build a UPI credit card, you have to be very serious about credit and very serious about tech. And what we also realised which we didn't know earlier is if you build for these customers who are in the boundary conditions, who don't get those small credit limits, like 10,000 rupees is great for many of these people in the 250 million who don't have access. If you build for them, you are fundamentally building a credit risk model which is based on their spending patterns and their cash flows. You are building a product that has inbuilt virality because you didn't want your cost of acquisition to be very high. Like you can't stand in a mall, you can't stand in an airport to sell your product to them because it's too costly. For 10,000 rupees limited, it will not work. So, you had to build a product that naturally is viral and people talk about it. And we had to build automations in a way that we can't have a person speaking to you in a branch all the time if you have any issue. All the things are available in your app at your fingertips. So, what we realised much later is if you build these things, anyways what happens is for those 40-50 million people also they are the best experiences. Which is how most of the technology and you would know this better than me, Dilip, industry history is about. Like Google was building for a page rank for academic papers, right? The Internet came for some very different use cases and became the internet it is today. So, we were also building for these fringes. We realised that the fringes are much larger and we realised that by solving for their problems, we are actually building the best product for the rest of the 40-50 million people also.

DILIP
If you build for the masses, it serves everybody. It serves everybody because you create that simplified experience, a very easy, very kind of hands-on thing. Nobody should deny, right? I think the principle that you are using is if you build it for all, irrespective of the strata or the demographics, it can be used by everybody. I think that's the point.

RAJAN
And it's a much better product for everybody. Like Google page rank became a much better search engine for everyone eventually.

DILIP
Actually, you are making a great point. I want to just talk, there's no better person to talk about the tech versus product balance and how you design something for the consumer. But I'm still struck on the point of when you're building a bank in a very different way and you spoke about some of the products needing a very different approach. You spoke about credit on UPI creating that journey and I've heard that you're building your own stack. So can you speak about that? How does this vision of building a own stack matches your vision? Because none of the banks today are actually building their own stack. If the existing system wants to build a bank for the future, how do they build? And how do the engineers add up to your vision in Slice?

RAJAN
Our engineers are really motivated by solving hard tech problems. But what they're even more motivated by is solving real world problems. And that's exactly what we're doing with building the entire core banking system in house. It is a necessity. We realised very early on that we have to build the entire core banking system in house. Because if we don't do that for the digital scale, it's just not going to be serviced from the monolith architecture that most of the traditional banking systems are still using. And they use that because someone else is building it for them. They are not directly having a technology team who is overseeing that development. So, what happens in the monolith system, our system is not a core banking system also. It's core banking microservices or core banking services. So, this architecture is core banking services architecture, which is quite a modern architecture. And you'll see many of the tech companies using that. It's mostly about the time to ship things. You have built these 60, 70 different microservices. In fact, we have the other problem where we're slightly higher in microservices. Now we're trying to cut down to 30, 40.

DILIP
The architecture is too distributed.

RAJAN
We went to the other extremes. So, we are solving that tech debt right now as we speak. But if you're scaling, we launched in February. Now we are touching almost close to half a million customers. By the time this goes out, maybe we'll be closer to a million new bank accounts that are getting opened every month. So, in order to have such kind of a ramp up, completely digital, no person involved, no person is going to a branch and saying, "Open the account." They're coming to the product directly and they're opening it themselves. You have to build the entire video stack in house, you have to have the entire core banking. If you don't do that, doing this by the monolith, if one system fails, like some part of the transaction system is failing, like your entire system has the potential to get impacted. So what these microservices really allow is we can just ship things faster. I'll give you an example with RD. RD is a very standard recurring deposit product, right? They're from forever. But in a monolith kind of a system, if you come up with an idea as a company, like you think that customers now want daily deposits because UPI auto-pays change something fundamental in the world.

DILIP
Right. Right.

RAJAN
And people are willing to pay 50 rupee every day instead of 1,500 rupee a month and that's a much bigger market. In order to build a daily deposit product on top of a monolith RD, you have to copy-paste that entire thing, building something for the RD and something for the daily deposit kind of a product. But in a microservices product, you're like, "Hey, these are like, you know, five different components of this product. I can keep these four components. These four are the best components. They're already working." I'll just switch this one component, make it from monthly to daily. And that's about it. It's the same service that can run. You don't have to create something new, which has to be managed separately. Daily product is, by the way, more efficient than a monthly product. So, it's great for the customers who are using it. They're able to much efficiently use their money and get better interest.

DILIP
No, no. I think you're using tech very wisely. You're dropping the marginal cost to near zero, because every addition of a new customer, it's going to be a fairly similar cost, because once you're building your tech, once you build a horizontally scalable tech, which can scale up, the compute and processing is not going to be much in that sense. I think it's great thinking and strategy. If we turn around to, you know, we will talk about two things on the consumer experience side, and we spoke about the first 300 and the 700, and we'll go to both. When you're looking at the first 300, how are you able to drive the engagement? What are your principles on designing the product for consumers for such a large, even 300 million is a large section, right? Because I think how are you going to deliver that experience, engagement, and create that love? You want to deliver that vision using the Slice app, and the backend supporting it together.

RAJAN
It's finally about building something for yourself, truly. Being very, very honest to yourselves, that's what do you want in the world. That's the starting point of solving all the problems. You see your relatives who are a shopkeeper, and you want them to have a better payment system, more instant settlement, better current accounts, digital current accounts. We want people like you to be able to use a UPI credit card, which is a great product for them. So that's the starting point and then build core banking. And then you focus on the right side of priorities, because there are obviously hundreds of problems to solve, like risk was very important for us. We also have built the video capacity stack, by the way, in-house. People go through our own video capacity, 300 million people who have practically a branch in their hand, and we should be the best branch for them in their phone. So then video capacity, if you build in-house, when the customer is going in, there's some suspicious activity, for example. We can instantly, at that time, trigger that we need extra checks for you, otherwise we can't onboard you. And these are the things while they are hygiene, but these are the things that allow us to scale. Today, we have the lowest suspicious account numbers in new customer onboarding. So being able to have this control on data and tech yourself is a big, big boon.

DILIP
I think I hope the engineers watching this show decide to build for India, and you spoke about this video KYC, you spoke about this, creating the very custom software using AI, right? And solving a real world problem. How are you using AI within Slice? What are the use cases which you are looking at? We spoke about video KYC. What are the other things which you are targeting? And what's your vision out of this? Because I think AI is going to eat the world, right? That's what people say. But how are you seeing Slice fit into today and tomorrow's AI world?

RAJAN
Yeah, so AI is like a new kind of a computer. And the way you interact with that computer is natural language. It's the coding language of that, right? India as a country has a real risk of going in this direction where you have this middle income trap. As a country, your average per capita income doesn't cross $10,000. So AI potentially is going to be a big reason that we have productivity gains on a human productivity level where people are producing not just for fellow citizens in the country, but for people outside, like fellow human beings. And that allows us to get out of this potential middle-income trap and go towards the vision that we have as a country of becoming a developed country within 2047. For banking, I think banking is that stabilising force, right? It's that small thing which allows you to have a sort of stable foundation on which you can think about productivity gains, you can think about growth. So that stability that banking provides, and many of those functions can now move to AI, make them much more efficient. For example, today already, like in customer service, 70% of our queries are being answered by AI. Almost like 25-30% of repayment follow-ups when customers don't pay on time are happening via AI. So it makes it much more standard and much more efficient also. That works out better than a human sort of doing that. When human can move to a much higher level of more creative work where you are designing those systems, you are thinking about what the insights are you are getting from the customer that you can build in the AI. You don't have to go anywhere. You can get the best advice also on what is making sense for you, what is not making sense. And that makes it much easier than those productivity ideas that they are getting because of AI. They can transform into a better business and be more productive.

DILIP
You know, the (bank) branches are seen as a trust factor by the citizens while doing the financial services. Somewhere I believe that. Because even the leading banks like SBI, HDFC, ICICI, Axis, the large publicity banks are still building the branches. Because one is the aspect of the human interaction and the value order of the human interaction and the trust. So how do you solve this? Because as a digital first bank or a tech first bank, what is going to be your strategy? We have spoken a lot on this Android ATM. Can you talk about that a little bit?

RAJAN
Great way to service customers through branches. Branches are going to be super relevant in the future also. Yeah. One is this Android ATM use case. When we analyse the Indian market, 300 million short, they have potentially they can get access to credit and they should move more and more towards this phone-based branch and then eventually phone-based bank. But then there are 700 million people who will take that route a little later, maybe 10 years, 20 years, 30 years later. So, for them, any of their physical banking related use case, taking cash, depositing cash, anything related to cheque, paying their family as a migrant worker, they have to use a physical setup. So these Android ATMs are amazing there because you can bring the cost down to a level where they are using UPI, something they understand. They just go and scan their phone, they enter money through UPI. They can enter their cash and they can send money to anyone. Just like on UPI. And practically very, very low cost. They will become their branches. Just put one more person, they are a small setup and that's like the branch for most of these people.

DILIP
So it's like you have a bank on a phone and a bank inside the ATM now. I think that. And the software should be fairly common. Because it's...

RAJAN
It has to be exactly the same that you have in your phone. Same thing is getting loaded to them. It’s just that they have that physical use case of a cash.

DILIP
And then I've been just thinking that I go to the Android ATM and I just say that, you know, you do the face authentication, you know, exactly who this customer is. And then there is an AI avatar talking to the consumer and I say that in just plain Hindi that - “mere do sau rupaye mutual fund mein nivesh kar dijiye” (Invest my ₹200 in a mutual fund), and the machine does everything. It just goes back and does the discovery, does the current NAV and comes back with the exact solution with the agentic AI and actually does that for the consumer. I think this, if you are able to build this kind of a software layer on both the consumer app as well as the Android ATM, I think that will drive huge engagement. I think that will be the next... The level two problems or level three problems, right? While we have solved the paying money or a scan and pay, I think the level two problem where the LLMs are trying hard to solve the layer two problem, level two problems to ecosystem access and get the ecosystem towards you. How are you thinking now?

RAJAN
Yeah. Yeah, well, exactly that's how we are thinking about it. For these 700 million people, if you're not thinking about them today, then we're not doing justice with the tech architecture that we have built. We are going to do all of that like you're saying in the phone anyway.

DILIP
This voice is magic, right? I'm seeing the biggest use case of AI is going to be the voice, right?

RAJAN
Voice is the way to get the billion people to bank with you, to transact with you, pay with you. UPI will be the first use case.

DILIP
What I hear from this whole large LLMs is that the voice, the youngsters are only talking and trying to interact with the AI, right? I think the voice is going to be the future. In India, multilingualism is the driving force, right?

RAJAN
Absolutely. Although in the cases where voice is still not faster, like where you are doing something which is very high frequency and you know exactly on the home screen of a product, you just tap that and things get there. Yeah, that'll be faster. So, I think the thing fundamentally changes, right? Consumers are naturally moving towards more and more faster and cost saving and better things for them. Things are becoming more efficient. So, wherever voice is more efficient, it's more efficient for many use cases, voice will be primary.

DILIP
You know, we have spoken on credit for every Indian or half a billion. The credit definition is changing, right? You know, and we speak about these three principles of super fast is the first S. The second is Small. And third is Short. And UPI credit, right? In that sense, you have been a, you have started leveraging UPI, the credit line on UPI. What's your experience and how are you seeing consumers using it? What's your plan to go to the masses with this?

RAJAN
Credit card is a 75-year-old product. UPI is going to change that fundamentally and it's going to start in India. We just have 40 to 50 million people using credit cards and transaction credit products in India. Why? 300 million people are eligible. Costs just sometimes don't make sense. You can't acquire them in the traditional way. You can't give them higher credit limits. Many of them only deserve 10,000 rupees to start with or 5,000 rupees even. So UPI reduces the cost. You don't even have to ship a card, no physical card, courier that, and you know, people receive that. UPI is so simple, everyone is using it. They are used to it. You can acquire customers at the point of sale. Yeah. You can give them lesser cost credit because merchants also want these customers to be able to transact with them. You show them rewards. You show them the control of their transaction upfront in the mobile interface. Earlier, it was all happening in an offline, you know, physical card world. And then also, by the way, very important. You give access to credit at so many more merchants now. And you solve really hard problems of fraud at some of these merchants because they are accepting credit for the first time. But for these people, the credit card and the instrument were not even relevant because your average ticket size was 3,000 rupees. 3,000 rupees is the highest type of ticket size transaction that they usually do. So those 500 rupee transactions with merchants or 200 rupees with merchants were not accepting. And they are also sometimes in an emergency or they are buying a course, you know, for education purposes. They just miss out. So by solving their problems, you make it a better product for everyone in the country.

DILIP
You are making a great point because, you know, that was our thought process that, you know, these 55 million merchants are not getting their share of the consumer's credit, whatever they are spending today. They could only spend on the large merchants. A nariyal paniwala (Coconut water seller) outside wouldn't get a credit card customer to spend on that 70 rupees. But, you know, today with the credit on UPI, that makes it possible. If you want to create a large consumption led economy, these merchants must have access to the consumer credit spends.

RAJAN
It was not just about that. It's about the future also for them.

DILIP
How do you see your next 10 years? Is it going to be Slice? Making Slice, one of the best banks in India or anything else? What are you thinking?

RAJAN
I really love what we are doing. Our team really loves what we are building. It could take even 15-20 years to build what we are building. And I'm super committed to that. And the problem that we are also solving can't be solved in two or four years. Yeah, super committed to building this for the long term.

DILIP
You know, while the banks is a long-term play, there is so much to do. I'm saying we as a country, I believe we have just started. Virtually banks can do everything right now. I'm saying today the whole digital financial services stack, while payments are at the bottom now. And while the PMJDY (Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana) and some of the schemes which the government launched have solved the inclusion problem, digitalisation is still a big problem to solve. And even though we take a claim that we have solved, there is a 10x growth. And the financial services, the credit, investment, insurance, which again the banks can play a key role.

RAJAN
Yeah, banking is like electricity for fintech. So, it touches everything that fintech touches. But if you can build it with the same ethos of fintech and tech, you can actually do a great job on the scaling at a consumer and merchant level also, where sometimes it's a struggle.

DILIP
On a lighter note, in the next two-three years' time, and I'm sure some of the other banks also are doing a lot of tech innovations. And I think this whole fintech versus bank debate dies down once you build the digital-only bank. How do you see the open banking or neo-banks future? If you are only building the digital bank, what is the need of a neo-bank?

RAJAN
There are always going to be some niche areas. India is such a large country. There are always these fringes that we discussed earlier. A teenager is there, a joint account for a married couple is there, or some senior citizen account is there, where they need something very special in a software. We discussed about high-frequency use-cases should be super simple. And then some of the complicated use-cases move to an AI first voice. So, for all of these super simple use-cases, where one person only just needs one thing, the digital banks of the world will also start giving options in some setting of yours that you can convert your entire product like this product, but many people will be naturally inclined to something that just build for that, also from a branding angle, like a D2C company, you're just too focused on that, your brand is built around that. So, there will be some relevance there always. And you can still build a very large company just by being on those outer use-cases. What do you think?

DILIP
I think the RBI has tried to solve this by, for example, account aggregator. UPI is one more example. But I think, when the government, RBI is thinking about the ecosystem, interoperability, open banking is going to be very important for a country's overall growth. Because, see, today, I don't believe that one entity can do everything. The partnerships are important, interoperability is important.

RAJAN
But banks should also do open banking. Why should banks shy away from also being a digital app for open banking?

DILIP
100%. I think, today, and thanks to the regulatory policy on interoperability, I think everybody has a level playing field. It's up to one's capability to kind of deal with the problem. Or once you build an app, that app must be for everybody.

RAJAN
Like, ULI is a great framework. So, if you are not able to service a particular merchant, particular business, for a particular loan use case, as a bank also, as a fintech for sure, but as a bank also, you should be providing that service within your product. Why not?

DILIP
No, I think I agree with you. Giving banking services versus giving the experience, I think that's what we are talking about. And, yes, banks have been having a mindset on, I'm here to give banking services, I'm here to give an experience, I see that changing now. With this whole interoperability concept, the account aggregator, I see the change of language. The experience is as important as banking services, rather than more important than banking services. That's at the core of your design or a consumer app. Automatically, the banking will become a subset of the direct part. So, I think it's here to stay. It will be interesting to see how everybody looks at it.

RAJAN
India has so many great banks. Some banks are really good at corporate, some banks are really good at housing, some banks are going to be good at some part of the banking, and then there will be some digital first bank like ours. But then there will be some companies which are building on top of the banks, and they're going to be good for those niches, and then open banking will allow all of them to also support other use cases. But then if those digital banks or these current banks can also be a part of open banking, and think of themselves as a fintech in that particular area, they can also do that.

DILIP
Yeah, it's inevitable, and let's expect that even in that area, we as a country create a leading push and ULI’s a great example in that aspect. Rajit, on the personal front, you have been a basketball player. Do you still get time to play sports while running a bank? Yeah, while building a bank.

RAJAN
I do play basketball every few weeks, even now.

DILIP
I know, you read a lot also. How does your reading journey or learning journey looks like.

RAJAN
The book that I keep finding myself going and reading again and again, is The Beginning of Infinity. What's the theory of knowledge? What are these good explanations? Just great books like Titan, like on Rockefeller and Steve Jobs' book, or now in On Musk's book. These are just great books. Titan one while I was in college, very inspiring.

DILIP
Let's move to some fun times. You know, the rapid fire.

RAJAN
Is there a hamper?

DILIP
What drives the company more? Whether it's a tech or a product?

RAJAN
Both go hand in hand. Engineers always want real world impact. So, if you're building great tech, but it is not serving a real world use case, it's a dud.

DILIP
A piece of advice you would give to your younger self. You are any which way. Maybe a wrong question to you, but still if you can.

RAJAN
Yeah, so maybe keep making the same mistakes anyway that you end up making. Just ruminate less about them, have lesser emotions about them, get out of them fast and just move forward.

DILIP
One skill which you wish you could have learned earlier.

RAJAN
This thing, like just moving forward pretty fast, like any setback, any small set backs, anything, any small failure, just get out of it.

DILIP
Youngsters who are aspiring to be engineers or the engineers who are going through their studies. What are the one or two messages you would like to give to them?

RAJAN
So, there will always be big platform shifts that will keep happening. We have seen so many of them. What doesn't change is people want to do things and we will not stop as a race till the time we figure out how to conjure a black hole within our galaxy at our will and then we do this and the black hole goes away. So, it's like an infinite kind of want that we can keep having. So, these platform shifts and all are all means to an end of what we want to do. So, just keep focusing on what people are moving towards in terms of their want and what is possible with the new knowledge that we all have created.

DILIP
It's going to be a lot of work on building software technology and in today's session you opened up so many use cases. I think that was really great, Rajan. I think that what are we solving for? Thank you very much for participating in this podcast and I am sure the viewers watching this would get immense benefit and get inspired by you started from twenty two and nine years you have been and you reached to the stage of you spoke about the number of accounts you are opening on a monthly basis. I think it is very inspiring. Thank you. Thank you once again.

RAJAN
Thank you so much for having me.

DILIP
Thank you for watching this podcast and I would request all of you to send us the feedback comments or any suggestions, question what you have for NPCI to address them in this podcast.