Abhishek Jain, Senior Vice President Product Management, Qwikcilver shared his thoughts on integrated prepaid platform as an architectural innovation. Companies cannot afford to stay afloat if they do not embrace innovation and change. Innovation helps companies grow, keep them relevant and allow them to differentiate. One such form of innovation is architectural innovation.
Companies at a different growth stage of their life cycle. They continue to assess the different opportunities and how that can be enabled to create value and continue capturing the different markets. One of the ways is architectural innovation. Architectural innovation is nothing but it's about creating a new solution out of your existing solutions to be able to capture the newer market and a newer business opportunities by changing the design of the products, putting up the components in a different base to be able to capture a newer market. Architectural innovation is generally targeted towards being able to get to the market in a shorter to a medium term time period. And took us through the examples that happened at Qwikcilver to bring architectural innovation and that's in the form of an integrated prepaid platform.
Open loop solution is an expansion of Qwikcilver portfolio for issuance and one of our key steps recently was to evolve product architecture that brings together the best in class of our two platforms, the Pine Perks with the network interfaces and the QwikGifts that manages the stored values.
Zerodha, is a fantastic app that has not only made it very easy for the users, but behind the scenes, it has been really tremendous in terms of the kind of scale that it has actually achieved. Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha shared his key learnings in the process. “Scaling with Common Sense” is how he defined the growth of Zerodha.
Common sense, ironically, isn't very common. serendipity, which he feels is a by product of common sense, the large number of random, unpredictable events that really shaped timelines. Zerodha was started with no roadmap. It was really a common sense move. It was a discount brokerage back then with a unique pricing model and that had started to catch on, but there was no technology per se in the company. Early 2010s, zerodha was a discount brokerage with no technology offerings, no technical folks, no tech stack. So in 2013, when they decided to start a technology company,they started out by doing the most fundamental things that were necessary back then, which was digitizing the business from the inside out, bit by bit.
By many interactions with various teams and understanding their manual workflows, automation is the next common sense issue which was addressed. Started instilling the idea of automation and people started realizing the true potential of automation and the requirements slowly started growing. After a few months, these tiny little scripts grew into bigger scripts and bigger projects.
In 2014 is when the team started building the trading platform with no prior experience in building a trading platform. But stuck to common sense principles.To obtain sustainability and scalability with technology, it is better stick to the common sense first principles.
Zerodha has achieved massive popularity on the basis of a user-friendly app and a robust platform that has handled billions of transactions.
QwikGifTS2 is a new avatar of an existing platform which is more focused on solving existing challenges. It unifies the customer values from multiple existing applications in a modern enterprise architecture, and adds many more additional values. Sridhar Nagendra, Senior Principal Engineer Qwikcilver, from the processing platform gave Overview of QwikGifTS2 Architecture. This session covered the current landscape of the processing platform and its challenges and what is the way forward and its architecture.
Blockchain Applications by Sadiq Ahamed, CEO Lysto. Sadiq shared a brief history of distributed computing with some examples of music and file sharing companies like Napster and BitTorrent. How decentralized storage and strategies of these companies worked using peer to peer sharing mechanisms and distributed software concepts. He briefly touched upon Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper, the philosophy of developing software as a rebel, about issuance of a decentralized currency on a distributed network, how the value of the currency is determined and how a participant could mine and get rewarded in the network. In 2014, Anil Dash wrote a paper about any “Digital Asset” that could be issued in the distributed network and that essentially became NFT. In 2017, a gaming company called Dapper Labs came up with a concept of CryptoKitties, an earlier form of NFT. Sadiq spent some time answering questions on smart contracts, crypto currencies, asset valuation, data security and other applications on the blockchain. He closed by sharing about the different services that Lysto provides in the blockchain in the gaming industry.
The caution from regulators have made most of the payment system operators in India stay away from giving crypto based services. Pramodh Kunnil, Senior General Manager Product Management Qwikcilver, gave us insights on the ongoing trends and the customer acceptance of crypto assets and tokens and explored the opportunities for Qwikcilver.
This session covered crypto from a business perspective, looking at things like, customer acceptance, relative acceptance, and new opportunities for Qwikcilver. There are broadly four reasons as to why crypto has been adopted a little slowly by the average consumer more as a payment option.
1. General in-accessibility as tender mode of payment platforms.
2. Relative ignorance about Crypto among the public.
3. Operational inconvenience of making payments using Crypto.
4. Avalanche of criticism against crypto as currency.
Crypto as asset ( store-of- value) and Crypto as currency ( medium of exchange) has its own definitions and functionality. Crypto serves great opportunities for a business. A quick look at some of the opportunities that Qwikcilver can get. Opportunities for Qwikcilver that are
1. Accepting Crypto currency via Third-party Services.
2. Distributing Crypto prepaid cards.
3. Collectibles / Rewards cards in the form of NFTs.
Dinesh Patel, Senior Architect Qwikcilver, talked about the LMAX disruptor, a framework that helps to achieve high throughput with low latency.
Aavishkar is a catalyst in bringing together ideas, people and innovation, and we have a mix of topics that gives you food for thought and action.