Borderless Ambitions: Globalising The India Stack

The India Stack, including Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), were set up originally in India to streamline and integrates payments and eCommerce in India. The India Stack has broader applications than just payments (UPI) and e-commerce (ONDC). Other components of the India Stack are e-sign (digital signatures), Digi-locker (documents registry), Aadhaar (digital identity) etc.

Their success domestically has not been unnoticed internationally. While UAE and Singapore have shown interest in UPI, Philippines, Morocco, Vietnam, Myanmar etc have shown interest in Aadhaar.

In Conversation With Prashanth Prakash, Partner, Accel, India; Sanjay Jain, Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund & Chief Innovation Officer at CIIE, India.

The panel opened with both speakers talking about their experiences with the India Stack and digital technologies to set up one of the biggest startup ecosystem in India.

“We will become data-rich before we become economically rich,” said Jain.

The panel now discussed about the revenue models for an application that is free. The example that is explained by Prakash is Justpay and Phonepay who earn through the additional services provided along with UPI on the existing platform.

The moderator now questions India's data privacy and use of digital products and services. Jain talks about the foundational identity which is necessary for any baseline digital system: “It is not the ID but how the services are build.”

Prakash touches upon the ideas of how Indian service providers based on the India stack who could now go on t3o become global firms. In continuation of the last point on taking firms global Jain talks about the challenges in making this goal a reality. He talks about the coordination required between governments along with the partnerships that the firms itself would like to undertake to go global.

Service providers in the health sector are diverse and the health stack in India is a complex problem and if we are able to solve this we could penetrate the global health market.

The audience then questioned the speakers about the financial stability of businesses setup on these stacks. Another question that is put to the panelists is on the reasons why India has still not been able to deliver a big brand like the Googles of the world.

Prakash talks about the importance of timelines to the growth of start-ups and them converting into Global businesses. Countries trust the Indian system and that is going to make them global.

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