Learnings from working at Jio

My 1-year contract at JioMoney ended recently.

My key take-aways (not in order):

1. Seek scale and bandwidth in whatever you do.
2. Learn fast, from your own mistakes and those around you. Digital ecosystems are the fastest moving spaces in this fast age.
3. Embrace digital communication. It is THE post-modern business language of the world.
4. Digital and social will rule, at least for a decade. Their forms and formats will keep changing, though.
5. Cashless is fast outgrowing cards and apps. Its immediate future is in wearables and the Internet of Things. And mid-term future? Perhaps in AI.
6. Cashless payments are an irreversible phenomenon in India and worldwide. They are the next biggest disruptor after the internet.
7. In India, cashless is a top-to-bottom process in a pyramidal framework. The best way to percolate it is to begin it as an urban phenomenon with cities as catchment areas. Then, steadily channelize it to the semi-urban and rural populace.
8. Points 6 and 7 are applicable on both the sides of the payment counter – payer and payee.
9. Digital wallets are one vertical where B2B (merchants) as well as B2C (users) are equal customers of the wallet company.
10. Aadhaar and payment banks are big triggers for fueling wallets’ demand.
11. Those companies who have integrated payment banks with wallets will have scale on their side.
12. Cashless is about habit change and behaviour change. In India, it will take its own time to form. And yes, there will be pain points; not all of them will be foreseeable.
13. India will become truly global when it is optimally cashless (about 20% of its payments).
14. Cashless is a reform as big as or bigger than GST. For more on this, please refer my earlier articles, "Why digitisation will likely succeed in India', and "2017 - Bring in Remonetisation".

Author was DGM, Branding and Marketing, at JioMoney between the Decembers of 2016 and 2017.

Disclaimer: The above are author’s personal learnings/views, and do not necessarily represent the views of the host ecosystem where he worked.

Note: Dear readers, thank you in advance for not posting comments for or against the fiscal and digital policy of the present government, digitisation, cashless, less cash, and the like. Please do not politicize this article or give it any other unintended slant. This is simply about sharing learnings gathered from a premier corporate culture, which will hopefully have some value for the readers.