Asia Tech Podcast - Episode 96 - Samir Bhatia - Founder & CEO at SMECorner - Give Money With Dignity Hi, this is Michael Waitze. Welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. Today, I’m joined by Samir Bhatia, the founder and CEO at SME Corner. Samir. Thanks for doing this. How are you doing today? Hey, Michael. Privileged to be here. I’m doing great. Thank you for having me on the show. It’s my pleasure. Can you give our listeners a bit of your background for context before we dig in a little bit? Sure. So I’m based out of, out of India. I live in Mumbai. I am a chartered accountant by training. Right. I started my career at bank. I worked a few years at Citibank did a variety of things at Citibank built credit models and some portion of risk and some corporate banking. And then I moved on to be one of the founding members HDFC bank, which is today, one of India’s most reputed and largest bank in India. Uh, I worked there for almost 13 years and great experience. I ran the, uh, the corporate bank, which included, you know, SME business mid-size businesses, all kinds of. All kinds of corporate lending, uh, an 80 in 2006, I moved out to be the CEO or Barclays retail commercial bank in India was the first employee. I set up the entire operations in India. And when I left in 2009, Uh, we had over a hundred branches and we were present. We had abandoned their presence. Uh, in 2009, I left to be the top found actually Equifax in India. Perfect. The credit Bureau, the US-based credit Bureau has no business establishment in India. And I put together, I stood together the joint venture with some local partners. I got the license from the regulators and I set up the Bureau and I ran the Bureau for three years, was to which I decided to turn it off entrepreneurs. So when I turned 50, I decided that, you know, I had. Seeing enough of the corporate world. And then most of my jobs that I did, the employment that I did, it was all entrepreneurial. In any case, the first one a month, the first employees of the company enhance setting up something from ganache did not seem that daunting, uh, when I, when I embarked upon it. So that’s, that’s my journey. It’s been a good five years that, uh, I’ve been at SME owner. And, uh, we have, uh, we have an interesting business. We lend to small retailers in India. You’re based in Thailand. So you know exactly what I’m talking about. Small retail stores and they are ignored, stick to the sector. And there is again, within this population of 40 million, there is a sizeable number who’ve taken one small loan before, or be like 10 to do it. Well, I’ve never taken a loan before. What? The ones we don’t lend to. Other ones who’ve taken a loan, but not rebate. So our only excluded community today is the one tool they cannot alone, but have delayed or defaulted or everybody else quantifies. Got it. And look, I want to be clear about the Genesis of the question. My grandfather left school when he was seven years old and ran multiple successful businesses. So to me, the equivalency between how educated you are and your level of business acumen is not necessarily correlated. In fact, I see sometimes that the ones who have not done a formal education, higher, a higher ability to take a risk in life because. They don’t want all this equate everything to a financial model that is running in their head and understand the business far better without complicating their lives. By trying to run the data to Excel models done better this way work and their ability to take a risk is far higher. So. I’ve seen that the businesses which are successful and they’ve been built by the older generation are based by those who haven’t formally gone to a school, and yet they run phenomenal businesses and they can rattle them calculate any, any, any number of formulation combinations without using a calculator or without using anything. The brain just works. Brilliantly without any kind of computer or any kinds of calculators. So, yeah, my, my guess is that if you had asked my grandfather, if he could do mathematics, he would have said no, because he never had a formal mathematical education. And yet if you asked him, like you said, if I give you this loan and you have to pay this amount of money, he could see him calculate it in his head. So you could definitely do it, but it just didn’t know that he was doing it. So I’m sure. That’s pretty standard. Right? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh gosh. Okay. Look, this was really, really great. I want to let you go, cause I’ve taken up way too much of your time. I really want to thank you. Send me about, yeah, for coming in and doing this, the founder and CEO at SME Corner. This was awesome. Thank you. Great conversation.