Fino: A fintech IPO light on bling

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Editor's note: In early 2015, the Reserve Bank of India received over 40 applications for payments bank licences. RBI’s proposal to allow specialized, smaller retail banks in the form of payments banks (can facilitate payments, accept limited deposits, sell third-party financial services, but not lend) and small finance banks (fewer restrictions, can issue loans, must target “priority sector”) was a hit in a market where a banking licence had earlier been a rare opportunity. In the end, RBI issued payments bank licences to 11 entities. Today, six of those payments banks are technically alive and operational, of which one (Reliance Industries’s Jio Payments Bank) seems to have no customers yet and another (NSDL Payments Bank) sees negligible activity from its customer base.  By 2019, analysts were already writing about the failure of payments banks as a business model entirely. Two, however, stand out:  Paytm Payments Bank, owned by IPO-bound Paytm, India’s most valuable fintech startup packed with venture capital fundingFino Payments Bank, also looking to go public, run by a quiet 14-year-old remittances and banking correspondent company, Fino Paytech Paytm, which has …