Travel The World Like Never Before? Go Places With Scapia

Hello, fellow Olio enthusiasts! 👋

Happy Hump Day and welcome to the 42nd edition of Weekly Olio - your weekly dose of giggles, wisdom, and a sprinkle of intrigue with our tantalizing thought piece (yes, we're talking about Publisher's Parmesan here). 🤭

A big shoutout to all of you for the fantastic support and feedback. Let's keep the momentum going in the days and weeks ahead! 😊

Today’s Publisher’s Parmesan features an episode of Founder Moments, where Vikram (Matrix Partners) uncovers Anil’s approach to building Scapia and his vision for the future. With less than 5% of the population currently possessing credit cards and India projected to have 200 million credit cards in circulation by 2030, the opportunities are vast.

For context, Scapia is a fintech company built on the belief that the world and humanity get richer when people travel. The brand offers financial products and travel services for young millennials & Gen-Z through their co-branded credit card. Connecting travellers with millions of merchants across the globe, the card is accepted in India and over 150 countries.

Exciting, right? 👏

Will come to that, but let’s first start with the curation.

Oh, and before you continue, it's time for some sponsor spotlight! Don't worry, it's not clickbait, it's just our way of 'feeling the ad-vantage'. So, do click, and help us keep the lights on and the puns rolling! 😀

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The Quote󠀢 💭

The Tweet 🐦

Pokémon Sleep, the latest addition to their lineup, has astonishingly accumulated a staggering 3 million global downloads within a mere span of two weeks. What's even more mind-boggling is the fact that gaming publications have been compelled to issue warnings to players, urging them not to resort to the consumption of sleeping pills in order to gain an unfair advantage in the game. Does the Pokémon Company have yet another massive hit on their hands? 🤯🤯

The Infographic 💹

Uber has $31.5B in cumulative operating losses since 2014, but still some investors complain that hardware is too capital-intensive to invest in. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Many investors, including LPs, simply aren’t intellectually honest about shallowtech versus deeptech investing.

The Short Read 📝

Japan’s digital ID program is a complicated mess - by Rest of World

The "My Number" card program, which was once seen as a beacon of hope and positivity, is now entangled in a web of complications, causing more problems than it has brought progress.

The Kishida government, feeling the mounting pressure to take action, has made a significant announcement regarding the Digital Agency responsible for the rollout.

In an effort to address the concerns surrounding the matter, they have decided to initiate a comprehensive investigation. This investigation aims to meticulously scrutinize each and every My Number card registration. However, the logistics of mobilizing the necessary resources to accomplish such a colossal task remain somewhat ambiguous at this point.

The Long Read 📜

Technical Momentum in China - by Dan Wang

Political repression poses a risk of slowing down economic growth. Following the Ant situation, companies are now more cautious about taking the risk of developing better payment and finance apps. This caution can lead to slower economic growth, which in turn weakens the legitimacy of the CCP and may encourage more repression.

A fatigued and weary populace, coupled with an overbearing and domineering state, does not bode well for the attainment of economic miracles. However, despite these unfavourable circumstances, the momentum of technological advancements has not yet come to a halt.

Nevertheless, the predicament lies in the fact that Xi, the leader of the nation, has already exerted considerable influence on this forward movement. What exacerbates the situation further is the commencement of his third term, which is still in its nascent stages, thereby intensifying the reliance of the policymaking apparatus on his capricious whims more than ever before.

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Publisher’s Parmesan 🧀

Travel The World Like Never Before? Go Places With Scapia

Disclaimer: This content was originally published by Matrix Partners as a podcast, edited and republished as an article here.

Scapia has made a remarkable entry into the market with the launch of its co-branded credit card in collaboration with Federal Bank. The response has been overwhelming, with massive growth in customer sign-ups. Tailor-made for travel lovers, the card turns a customer's everyday expenses into exciting travel rewards. And the perks are unparalleled! From zero-forex markup to unlimited domestic lounge access, zero joining and annual fees, it is the ultimate travel companion.

Anil Goteti, Founder, Scapia chats with Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix Partners.

Vikram: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Matrix Moments. A super exciting and special episode for me, I have with me Anil Goteti, founder of Scapia. We’ve been privileged to back Anil again in this startup. I think we’ve been in partnership with Scapia for a year, year and a half now.

Anil: Yeah, about a year.

Vikram: So this is really the coming out party coming out from stealth mode. So privileged that he’s doing that with us. A quick introduction to Anil, he grew up all over India then went to the US through his time at Kellogg and UIUC and Qualcomm, travelled a bunch, a bit of a travel freak and we’ll come back to sort of how that’s played a role in the formation of this. He spent nine formative years at Flipkart pretty much building different parts of it and that's how we got to know each other. So welcome, Anil.

Anil: Thank you, Vikram. Great to be here and I think it’s fantastic to be having this conversation again after probably close to a couple of years. But building a fun company and a fun product so looking forward to talking more.

Vikram: So, what is Scapia, how did this journey sort of come about?

Anil: It is Scapia, and the root is escape, I’ll tell you what the product is and why there’s a root on escape. Yeah, but we wanted to add an a in the end because good brands end in a I have this random thesis which only I guess I believe in but that's how the brand came about, the domain was also available. We’re building a credit card for travellers, we’re all travellers, I'm a traveller, I don’t know how many people know but I’ve been travelling for the last 20 years, I’ve been to more than 33 countries. I’ve done road trips across the US, across India, like once I’ve driven all the way from New York to San Francisco.

One of the things that I wanted to do was actually build a B2C company focused on India focused on the things that I believe that I know very well, the network and connections that we’ve actually built and use that for compounding. That's what you want to do, right? And in that reflection, I was thinking of all the things that Indians are going to spend in the next 10-20 years.

I think in the next 20 years India is going to see a lot of time and money being spent on things that people value. And I was looking at what are all the things that people spend on when they have disposable income two things came out for me. One was retail and the other one was travel.

Travel is something that just was passionate to me, I never thought I’ll build a business associated with travel. Everybody is a traveller, and everybody has different degrees of travel but I was double-clicking on what travel could look like and like India, only 0.2% of GDP is spent on travel. If you looked at the research like in US and China it’s almost 1% of the GDP is spent on travel. So I started going deep on travel and it was like let me talk to youngsters, let me talk to millennials who are travelling, there were a lot of insights that came about.

Vikram: How many travellers would you have talked to during that period?

Anil: Every month typically I spent talking to about 30-40 folks. I think the first 2-3 months of this journey I just was doing that. And the idea kept changing, the first idea was let me bring an OTA, okay, because I think there’s an OTA to be built with the kind of experience that millennials are looking for, looking for immersive experiences, they’re looking for offbeat destinations, they want the content to suit that, they want a lot of transparency, they want very good customer service.

There were a lot of those insights that came about. But what was also interesting is when people travel there are some unique needs, right, and that was actually the epiphany. There is a lack of transparency when people go abroad, and there is a need for a financial instrument to be able to use it. Some of them take currency, some of them take like a Forex card, but there’s a lot of hurdles and friction and I was thinking I’ll actually build a Forex debit card. And I went with the thesis and I interviewed a whole bunch of users, 9 out of 10 said I want to use my credit card. But what they lack is actually transparency in using the card they get a statement after 40 days, they don’t know what the Forex is, and there’s a markup. There’s a little bit of that I want to use but I cannot so I have to figure out other instruments and that was really like the epiphany moment for me.

I was like there is a big need for a card that serves travellers, Forex is just one piece of it but if I look at the entire gamut of what a card would look like for travellers there’s so much to offer. And I’ve been privileged and lucky to be in the US where I experienced some of these cards like the Capital One cards and the Amex cards where there were rich rewards, At that time, at least, they were delightful and I think over time technology in India has actually far exceeded what is there. But there are a lot of things that come together to make a fantastic credit card experience for travellers and that's a daily use case product, right, it’s something that everybody uses every day across various things. You travel twice or thrice a year and when you do that you have a whole bunch of points that you can actually redeem and I’ve been using cards like this which will actually give me free travel and make my life a lot more delightful.

There is a unique product to be built in India just for this, India is going to go through a rise where disposable income is going to increase, and millennials are going to travel a lot. Credit card penetration is very, very low and there are a lot of tailwinds. And Covid was ending, travel was going to come through the roof I was like, this is it.

Can't get enough of this conversation? Us neither! Check out the full episode below to satisfy your craving for more insights and ideas (directly jump to 12:50 to continue ahead). 😃 

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