Meet the former Paytm execs who are building a pocket money app for kids

Shankar Nath and Ankit Gera are digitising pocket money for children while nurturing financial knowledge and discipline in them at an early age via their startup Junio

When Shankar Nath quit Paytm in 2018, little did he know he would be joining hands with ex-colleague Ankit Gera, whom he had interviewed at Paytm, to start a venture that helps instill financial literacy among children.

Those who know Nath would agree that for a person who had spent about two decades in the financial industry, his next venture bet would be in the financial sector. Besides, working at Paytm gave both Nath and Gera immense insights into how this sector works.

Launched in 2020, Junio is the first-of-its-kind pocket money app developed to inculcate a habit of savings among the pre-teens and teens. The idea has already seen traction from the venture capital ecosystem and the startup has raised $1.3 million, as compared with the initial target of $500,000 in an angel round.

It took the company a month to close their first funding round (February 2021) and the amount will be utilised for custom acquisition, alliance with brands, and hiring of tech and products team. It currently has a team of nine members most of who came in with a pay cut as they believed in the idea and the founding members.

“While kids are using a lot of online payments platforms and have a significant influence on many buying decisions online, they don’t have a financial instrument of their own and they either borrow their parents’ cards or constantly go back to parents to get OTPs,” says Nath, an IIM alumnus and former Chief Marketing Officer at Paytm, who joined the fintech behemoth in 2013 when it was taking baby steps in the startup ecosystem.

This triggered a chain of thoughts as children spend a lot of time online but there isn’t too much taught about the value of money to them, says the Junio co-founder.

The company has rolled out both the Junio app and Junio card and is working towards adding interesting features which would incentivise kids as well as teach them the value of money. One such initiative is where parents can create an in-app daily task for their kids and tie them with perks or children can learn how to save on the app for a big-ticket item by putting in a monthly amount towards a goal.

With the Paytm experience at hand, the company will be applying the marketing and product enhancements learnings and the simplicity mantra to their product. For instance, Nath got a hands-on-experience on how to build for scale at Paytm and saw this translate into 15x growth. Both Nath and Gera are finding several of Paytm’s learnings useful in their venture too.

“However, there we had infinite resources, but here we have to be frugal initially and grow in a way which is sustainable,” says Nath.

With the Paytm experience at hand, the company will be applying the marketing and product enhancements learnings and the simplicity mantra to their product. At Paytm, they learnt about the massive power in collaboration. The duo worked closely with more than 100 brands on their consumer promotions with Paytm cash as redemption. 

"The biggest advantage of being a part of the journey at Paytm is that one has seen scale at close quarters. Unless one is a  part of the journey it is difficult to visualise that scale. We have seen growth and how a brand name can end up becoming a verb, like Paytm or Google. For this, several elements need to come together: branding, growth, tech, and relationships. “But that still  doesn’t guarantee success. For the same inputs, sometimes the output can be extremely different. But what it does is it makes the odds better for us. A past experience helps us see opportunities that can possibly become big in the future," say the Junio cofounders.

Another key learning from Paytm is that there is no substitute for robust tech and product. "The uptime plays a significant role, and transaction success rates have to be close to 100 percent. Else, users will leave. Everyone has a choice. A successful tech product ensures that users have no motivation to leave and try out something else," they explain.

The company is planning to monetise the platform through a subscription fee of Rs 99, and the 1-1.5 per cent merchant discount rate fee on the transactions that will happen on the app. It has already issued 1,000 Junio cards in a week and is aiming to scale this to 100,000 cards in 6 months.

“We are looking at issuing 5 million cards in the next 3-4 years. Once we have a large community of parents and children, there are a lot of products that can be curated and exposed to the community such as edtech packages, child insurance plans etc,” tells Gera.

The company is today backed by prominent angels such as Cred founder Kunal Shah, Bharat Pe CEO & cofounder Ashneer Grover, PolicyBazaar CEO Yashish Dahiya, InnoVen Capital MD & CEO Ashish Sharma, and Groww cofounder & CEO Lalit Keshre, among others.

Investor take:

“What’s most impressive is Junio’s approach to meet the needs of the millennials who are inclined towards the digital world, shopping online using their parent’s debit/credit card. The new-age fintech startup aims to nurture financial literacy among children and empowers them to grow into financially independent adults,” says angel investor Dib Chaudhuri.