Asaan Mobile Account: Aam Aadmi Ki Azadi.

About yourself, professional achievements and accolades

I was selected as a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and serve on the Board and the Executive Committee of the American Pakistan Foundation. Previously I served as President of The Citizens Foundation-USA, a non-profit dedicated to building schools for underprivileged children. As a practicing lawyer I am a Partner at Clifford Chance and serve as the Head of Banking and as Global Head of Transport and Logistics. I graduated from Boston University with a BA and from Georgetown Law School with a Juris Doctorate.

Question: Looking at yours' and the family business background, it is quite interesting to observe that your Group has ventured into the digital financial arena which is quite challenging. Please elaborate on how and when did you get the idea of establishing the company VRG?

ANS: The concept for VRG was conceived in 2013 by my youngest sister (Nefer Sehgal) when she and my father discussed the challenges our blue-collar employees faced when trying to access banking services, typically during the onboarding process to receive their salaries and then to transfer it to their families in rural areas. With a guarding force of more than 15,000 we learnt that at a certain point in time most of our own people have had to succumb to using financial services which charged even higher to send money than conventional banks. We saw opportunity in the crisis that banking for the poor was more expensive due to the last mile problem.

Banks open branches on the basis of foot-walk and feasibility, therefore, in a 60% financially excluded adult population scattered across the nook and cranny of the country a franchise model provided relief. However, back in the days agent led banking model soared cost of business and deliberated on Over the Counter (OTC) transactions for maximizing revenues and commissions and did not wholly encouraged deposit taking, such that a customer could partially withdraw an amount and deposit the remaining. This was also a huge problem for international remittance beneficiaries. The one-to-one model was prevalent at the time and every Telco ventured in by pairing with a microfinance bank, we saw this as a restriction provided the fact that while USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) was initially available to agents and later moved on to customers, mobile apps weren't an option and account opening was greatly influenced by the telecom company of the subscriber. Agent interoperability meant that an agent is non-exclusive to sign-up with any bank a term which not even loosely came close what it meant. The agent dictated the money transfer service on a higher commission bias. The present statistics of financial inclusion of the Country...