🧵While we in Fintech are Hoping for Challenger/Neo Banking Licences from RBI. Let's understand more about Small Finance Bank and from their success, try to see if a balance between Profitability (for business) and Financial Inclusion (for RBI) can be made for future usecase?👇

Since Independence, Financial Inclusion has been a top policy agenda for the central govt and hence for the RBI also, Post 90s, the accent was more on demand-led private initiatives through self-help groups, followed by the Grameen Bank model of microfinance in India.
Then, in 2015, the RBI granted licenses to two differentiated banks (SFB and Payments Banks) for pushing the financial inclusion. PB had been a mystery category, with no clear business model to operate. SFB was to cater to the diverse needs of the low-income group.
The two KEY expectation was:
1. Priority Sector Lending (75% of their total lending) and 2. Branches for Unbanked (SFB were required to have 25% of their branches in rural unbanked centres (population shall be less than 10,000)
Most (8/10) of the SFBs were previously microfinance institutions (MFIs) with a few notable exceptions, such as the Capital Small Finance Bank which was a local area bank. So, achieving the above TWO pointers was not a thought ask for them.
On the PSL front, they seem to be doing quite good. Primarily for Agricultural purpose and MSMEs, there is a recent surge in the share of housing loans also.
Given they took some time in gaining Public Confidence in the deposits, at the start they were funded by Banks. However, in FY20 deposits contributing ~60% of liabilities, with a 48.1 Y-o-Y growth.
While the deposit base of SFBs has been expanding, they still have a long distance to cover as compared to other SCBs in the mobilisation of CASA (current and savings accounts). This highlight the growth opportunities.
But then there is a concentration risk also. Top-two/three SFBs accounted for 46%/60% of total assets of all SFBs as of FY20. And, hence there is a Regional concentration also.
While some of the under-served states like MP and Rajasthan are served well. Still, SFB continues to be concentrated in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Share of SFBs in Total Assets and Banking Business are still too small. Liabilities ramp-up is quite good and their collections ability is quite good, given most of them were MFIs.
The growth of some of these SFB is quite good (esp the 3 listed players). Now, this could work as a template for Future Banking Licences in India. SFB will play the most important role in the RBI's action plan of “providing banking access to every village within a 5 KM radius"

More from Business

The American business community is speaking with a unified voice - NAM called to invoke the 25th Amendment; the Business Roundtable and Chambers of Commerce urge a peaceful transition of power; all have denounced last week's violence. What might this mean? A few implications:
1/

This isn't just PR - bad politics is bad for business. Here, the Harvard Business Review makes the business case for democracy (leading essay by

Historically, business has been a crucial ally for democracy. Mark Mizruchi shows how business helped secure democracy after WII, through organizations like the Committee for Economic Development (see also his @NiskanenCenter paper:
https://t.co/xoqUUN1nCD)

3/

My book examines how business groups formed to lobby against patronage and corruption, and in favor of institutional reform, in the 19th c. (https://t.co/FnNhZUupBG)

For a summary of business’s role in American democracy over the 20th century, see

Today, corporations are cutting off PAC $$ — Wall St banks (JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup), big tech (Microsoft, Facebook). Many more corps have suspended donations to members of Congress who contested the certification of election results last week
5/
A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.

Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.

But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.

Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.

Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.


The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.

V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.

V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?

Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.

There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.

But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.

You May Also Like

A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.