“Without trust, we have no future. Innovation is impossible without trusting something new. Trust is the new capital and engine of progress. Managing and designing for trust is crucial to thrive in the digital age.”

German author Philip Kristian in his book ‘The Trust Economy’ talks about why trust is the world’s most impactful economic power. Trust gives people and companies the ability to dominate the conversation, maximise their business and build the future they like.

Especially in today’s polarised world, with massive idealogical differences between nation states, and social media oligopolies coming under fire for using privacy intrusive algorithms to collect personal user data; trust in enterprises is eroding amongst people.

We at mBnk recognise this as a major bottleneck for economic and societal growth of a nation. Talking specifically about India, historically, trust has been the single major driving force of trade, commerce and finance. Relationships between businessmen and traders have carried down for generations and trust plays a key role in doing business and extending credit.

A villager traditionally borrowed money from the local moneylender and could be held accountable for any wrongdoing. The legacy relationship between people of the same village served as an important driver of trust and comfort.

With the advent of technology startups and institutions disrupting this entire ecosystem; trust is now forcefully being shifting from individuals to organisations. Earlier, an individual used to make all their purchases from the local Kirana store, the owner of which used to be known and trusted by the entire locality or village.

Today, the same trust is now to be imposed upon an e-commerce company with no legacy backing it and importantly no single individual to hold accountable.

This makes people apprehensive of using their services and often getting cheated and not having anyone to hold accountable. This leads to especially people in the bottom of the pyramid living in rural and semi urban areas not enjoying benefits offered by technology and new age financial services.

mBnk recognises this problem and is building a unique ‘Phygital’ ( Physical +Digital) financial services marketplace backed by pillars of trust, i.e, local retailers. We plan to leverage the benefits offered by Fintech and trust offered by retailers to provide an offering powerful enough to make financial services accessible in every corner of ‘Bharat’ and not just ‘India’, i.e, the top tier of our 1.2 billion population.

Despite a robust payment infrastructure and various government initiatives such as the J-A-M trinity ( Jan Dhan Accounts, Aadhar and Mobile Payments), access to financial services remains elusive for the poor. Even after Demonetisation in 2016, India primarily remains a cash based economy. Last mile financial infrastructure remains a weakness and there is ample opportunity to mobilize this idle cash into income generating assets.

Our retailer backed model plans to bring banking, loans, insurance and savings within 5 km to everyone in the country. We believe that this offering of Fin-tech coupled with our trusted retailer network can help increase the ambit of financial services in India and provide the final push for individuals to move away from cash and enjoy the financial benefits of being included in the organised economy.

mBnk is just getting started, so follow this space for more as we take on our journey to establish a ‘Trust Economy’ and ‘Build for Bharat’.

‍