The consumer fintech bet: why India was never one market

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Ajinkya Kulkarni showed up at our office in Pune one day with a fairly simple idea. He wanted to build a liquid fixed income product that could give consumers an attractive return, around 12% at the time.
I remember thinking this was interesting because I had been wondering if there was an opportunity to build something like a Yieldstreet for India. The two ideas matched almost immediately, so we started talking.
That led to a lot of brainstorming around fixed income, how consumers in India thought about it, what was missing, and how much easier the whole experience could be made. We started calling the vision the Passive Income App of India, and that was really the beginning of what eventually became Wint Wealth.
A lot has changed since then, both in the company and in the market, but Wint has really been one of the torchbearers of making fixed income accessible to Indian consumers. They built the product, educated consumers at scale and created what I think is one of the best fixed income experiences in India.
But the Wint story is also part of a much broader way we have thought about consumer financial services at Better.
When people talk about the Indian consumer, there is often a tendency to talk about hundreds of millions of users as if they are one large market. We have never really looked at it that way.
India is almost the opposite.
It is a collection of a very large number of consumer segments, each potentially tens of millions of people, that can be quite different from one another. What work they do, how much they earn, how predictable that income is, what they aspire to, how they save, how they invest, and what kind of financial products make sense to them can all be completely different.
A gig worker is a very different financial services customer from a young salaried professional. That person is different again from an NRI, a crypto investor, a mass affluent investor or an ultra HNI.
And our view was that if these users are so different, why should the financial experience built for each of them look the same?
We believed there was an opportunity to build a dramatically better, almost 10x experience for each of these segments. And quite often, we believed these would need to be different companies altogether.
The founder DNA required to understand one of these consumers deeply can be very different from another. The product, distribution, trust, partnerships and the way you think about the customer can all be different. We never really believed that you could build one generic financial services company and simply keep adding ten products for ten very different segments underneath it.
That thinking informed a lot of our consumer fintech investing.
Wint was one expression of it. Fixed income had historically been relatively cumbersome for consumers to discover and invest in. Wint essentially took that experience and rebuilt it around what a modern consumer would want.
Gullak came from another direction altogether. Gold is already deeply understood and trusted in India. The opportunity was to make saving in gold incredibly simple and build a modern experience around something Indians have been doing forever. It has been a phenomenal journey watching the team build the product, the brand and partnerships across the offline jewellery ecosystem, and I think they are still scratching the surface of what is possible.
Mudrex was another early investment for us. Crypto was clearly going to attract a completely different kind of investor, but investing in it in India could be confusing and intimidating. Mudrex built one of the most trusted ways for Indian users to invest in crypto, with compliance at the center of how they approached the market. Watching the team build out Mudrex over the years has been another incredible journey.
Then there is SBNRI, which went after another massive segment altogether.
There are millions of Indians living around the world who want to invest back into India. But the experience can involve banking, KYC, taxation, repatriation, documentation and a whole set of hoops that are very specific to an NRI.
SBNRI essentially asked: why does this have to be so cumbersome?
They were one of the earliest companies to focus deeply on the NRI investing experience and built much of the product and underlying workflow required to make it dramatically more streamlined. They have built a tremendous brand in the segment, and I think they are still just getting started.
So if you zoom out, Wint, Gullak, Mudrex and SBNRI look like very different companies.
And that is exactly the point.
They are all expressions of the same underlying idea: take a particular segment of consumers, understand what is broken or unnecessarily difficult about their financial experience, and build something dramatically better specifically for them.
For a while, we felt we had built a pretty interesting portfolio around this idea. Different founders going after different parts of financial services, each trying to create a much better experience for a particular kind of customer.
And then AI showed up.
That made us look at the same thesis again.
Our existing companies are obviously going to use AI to make their products easier and better. But we also started wondering whether AI makes it possible to build an entirely new financial experience for a segment whose relationship with money itself is quite different.
Gen Z was an obvious place to look.
How a 22 or 25 year old thinks about earning, spending, saving, travel, experiences, work and eventually investing can be quite different from the way previous generations were taught to think about personal finance. Yet most financial products still start from a fairly traditional framework and essentially ask the user to adapt to it.
We felt AI could change that.
That is what led us to our latest investment in this thesis, Smooth Money.
The way I think about Smooth is as a personal financial companion for Gen Z. It should understand your life, your behaviour and what you are trying to do with your money.
It is not there to tell you that you should not have had that extra coffee because it interferes with your SIP goal. That is not how people actually want to live.
Instead, it understands how you already live and helps you make better decisions around that. It can help create savings buckets, think through goals, understand spending and increasingly become something you can simply have a conversation with about your money.
Think of it as every Gen Z having their own personalized financial advisor.
We are still very early in that journey, but I am extremely excited about what Smooth can become.
In some ways, Smooth is simply the latest version of the same thesis we started with years ago.
There is no single Indian financial services consumer.
There are many Indias sitting inside India, with different incomes, professions, behaviours, aspirations and relationships with money. And technology keeps making it possible to build a dramatically better financial experience for each of them.
We are going from a relatively small number of rigid, cumbersome, one size fits all financial products to a world where founders can build very specific experiences for very specific consumers.
AI should take that personalization much further.
So when I look at Wint, Gullak, Mudrex, SBNRI, Smooth and several of the other companies we have backed around this idea, I do not think this journey is anywhere close to done.
If anything, I think we are still at the beginning of moving from financial products built for everyone to financial experiences built for you.
The third of a five-part series by Vaibhav Domkundwar explores the consumer fintech thesis behind investments in Wint Wealth, Gullak, Mudrex, SBNRI, and Smooth Money. The piece argues that India is not a single consumer market, with different segments requiring distinct financial products and experiences. The next two parts will explore other microtrends and lessons.

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