“Being a start-up founder is about jettisoning your comfort zone for good”

Adgully has been turning the spotlight on the entrepreneurs who fought against all odds to bring their dreams to fruition in our special series – START-UP STARS. We at Adgully wholeheartedly support the ‘Vocal for Local’ movement and have been featuring numerous local/ homegrown businesses, brands, and Apps in the country launched in the last few years.

SanKash is a team of travel enthusiasts and Finance technocrats on a mission to make travel one of the accessible and affordable pleasures of life for ordinary people. In their endeavour to do the same, the primary focus is on designing products and solutions which help travel payments work for everyone: the travel merchants, lenders, and travellers.

Identifying the massive gap within the Indian travel market between travel experiences and availability of money on time for the same, Akash Dahiya and Abhilasha Negi brought forth the unique, concept-based alternative lending solution, SanKash. Their idea was to empower both the stakeholders of the travel ecosystem through its pay-in-parts solution. With SanKash offering affordable payment plans, its travel partners operating both online and offline, can get their customers to take the travel decisions faster and increase the trip value, thereby augmenting their sales.

In conversation with Adgully, Akash Dahiya and Abhilasha Negi, Co-founders, SanKash, speak about their entrepreneurial journey with SanKash, challenges faced in the adoption of the core business proposition, learnings from the Covid period, and much more.

Please take us through your journey as an entrepreneur. What motivated you to establish the company?

Akash Dahiya and Abhilasha Negi Dahiya: When trying to organise a trip in 2016, we ran into difficulties. After all of our preparation and effort, we realised that our dream vacation was beyond our budget range. At that point, we began to look more closely at potential solutions to enable travelers in need of financial assistance to continue their journeys. According to a self-commissioned analysis by Grant Thorton, the self-sponsored travel sector in India has a value of $42 billion, and 90% of it is offline and highly fragmented. For offline retailers, there are no POS financing solutions available. 77% of travelers prefer choices for financing, while about 40% of tourists are prevented from traveling because of a lack of funds. Also, there are many different layers of complexity in the travel ecosystem, which is very fragmented.

We felt we had to focus even more on the issue. In 2018, we established SanKash – ‘Sans’ in Latin means without, and ‘Kash’ is a symbol for money. The business currently gives customers the option to travel now and pay later (TNPL), in addition to serving as a one-stop shop for all financing requirements for travel merchants.

What was the need of this brand from a consumer’s perspective? What is the core business proposition?

We operate in 338 cities in India, which is spread across all parts of India through our travel merchants.

Our monetisation model is three-pronged:

• We earn a subvention from the merchant on zero percent product for 6 months (5.5%)
• We charge an MDR of 2%
• Loan origination commission from the NBFC of 1-2%

In addition, we earn upsell and cross-sell revenue through travel insurance and payment gateway services (5%). Generic lending platforms miss out on upsell and cross-sell opportunities due to the non-specificity of the end use of funds. Hence, there is a contribution margin of 6%.

What are your key learnings so far? How do you see the company's ecosystem progressing in 2023?

Our key learnings have been:

COVID brought us the largest learnings thus far. The financial behaviour of the travellers have changed from a ‘spend only’ mode to a ‘save and spend mode’, where they want to spend on travel, but do not want to touch their savings for the same.

Also, from a regulatory standpoint, India has a very specific and poignant regulatory framework unlike our BNPL counterparts abroad. Hence, keeping clean from a regulatory framework perspective is also our utmost priority in the given scenario.

We see SanKash’s ecosystem to start catering to the financial needs of niche markets within travel, which have been the pain points of merchants for a long time, like destination weddings, cruises and sports travel segments apart from products like forex. Furthermore, we will also be focussing on deepening our merchant activations in the coming months too.

How is digital helping you further your business?

It’s a fragmented market with roughly 300,000 POS operating in the travel space. But they don’t have a storefront. Most of them are 100% digital tech-savvy. The only way to break into this market is by creating a strong distribution network and reaching out to the last mom-and-pop stores, and creating a strong technology interface, as most of these merchants are used to digital working for making their bookings. Hence, technology is the enabler to help us achieve a breakthrough.

How did you identify your TG? Did you carry out any feasibility study prior to starting your business?

Our target group is all the merchants in the travel, aviation, and hospitality industry. We want to reach out to Gen X and Gen Z customers through them. As mentioned earlier, we found that about 40% of travelers are unable to travel due to a lack of funds, and 77% of travelers want financing options; thus, we decided to launch a B2B fintech platform specialising in travel-now-pay-later (TNPL) to provide POS alternative financing options for travelers and to provide a one-stop-shop to all travel merchants for their finance related needs.

What were the challenges that you faced in your start-up journey and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge in starting was the adoption challenge with travel merchants and educating the travel merchants about the importance of TNPL to grow their business.

We initially started with a bootstrapped founder’s money of Rs 2 crore and started with just one lender – DMI Finance on the FLDG model. In 2020, we had to go through a COVID reset and put our focus on pivoting to becoming a lending platform.

In 2021, we started offering multi-lender TNPL, integrated three more pay-later providers, and picked up our bridge round of funds. In 2022, our growth began, with 6,000+ travel merchants onboarded with us, 5 TNPL partners, and onboarded marquee brands like IndiGo, EaseMy Trip, Cordelia Cruises, and Radisson Hotels, to name a few.

What would be your message for budding entrepreneurs?

• Start with a clear vision and set realistic and achievable goals that align with your vision. 
• Be resilient: Being a start-up founder is about jettisoning your comfort zone for good. Be prepared to face challenges and set-backs, learn from them and use the learning to your advantage.
• Stay agile: While you keep your eye on your vision, it’s very important to stay flexible and open to change. Adapt to the new demands, trends and technologies to stay ahead in the game.
• Stay customer centric: Your value lies in the value that you create for your customers. Your customers should be passionate about your product, the same way that you are passionate about your product!