How one Idea ad sparked my interest in fintech

Down the memory lane

Do you remember the idea ads? Do you remember Idea? Well Idea was a telecom company which merged with Vodafone in India to have a fighting chance against the juggernaut that is Jio. Well before Jio came into the picture, Idea launched a series of ads showcasing innovative ideas like how paper can be saved by using our phones more, how internet can be used for self learning.

But there is one ad that resonated with me, its the Idea Ad where the tagline was to save paper and replace it with digital alternative. The ad goes over ideas (pun intended), like digital boarding pass, digital notetaking. But the one section where a woman buys fish and sends money to the seller using her phone, seeing something like that back in 2010, it intrigued me beyond belief. Even as a small child, it sparked the metaphorical light bulb in my head or the set the gears in motion so to speak. Little did I know that’ll set my interest in the fintech industry.

Cash is my mortal enemy

Cash was always something that felt unreliable to me. Sure it became a better alternative to carrying sacks of gold centuries ago but now it’s a nuisance. Imagine always having to carry bunch of notes and remembering to fetch some before you leave. Whenever I had a khujra war with an auto driver I always hearken back to the old Idea ad showing phones as a medium for transferring money from person to person.

My early attempts

I have ideated some devices during my school days that can be used to transfer money in P2P fashion. I guess you all know pagers, back then I had no ideas of servers, APIs or the whole shabang that we currently have, all I had in mind was a pager like device with a numpad.

My idea was like mobile balance the money can be stored in the pager and can be transferred with other people using infrared. The next iteration, I thought of was USSD, (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), remember, you dialled a number and a menu popped up, you pressed numbers (you won’t if you’re born after like 2008).

Actual precursors to UPI

Little did I know, there were attempts to do it with the USSD idea in India and really successful attempts outside. Like in Kenya, they introduced this USSD powered mobile banking call M-Pesa which transferred money from number to number. It was launched by Safaricom and Vodafone jointly. M-Pesa was launched in India but it failed to gain traction. The other attempts were made by Airtel money.

Then there were a wave of wallet based apps like PayTM which did gain some popularity with its aggressive ad campaign and there were adopters of it. I was one of the first users of it and I had to say it was convenient. But then UPI came.

UPI is everything I wanted and then some

UPI changed the game for the Indian economy. It finally brought that dream of mobile banking I started having since I watched the Idea ad. Something that felt like fantasy is now mundane nowadays. Even my local fish market accepts UPI and most people just use that instead of cash.

My interest in fintech kept expanding with cryptocurrencies, how banks operate and how ETH came in the 80s to name a few.

Happy to say, I now work in the fintech industry as a Java developer and I hope to make some substantial contribution to it someday. Like rewriting the entire COBOL backend for banks in Rust? I will save that for the next article.