Inside the digital FD universe: How fintechs are breathing new life into an age-old banking product

On November 21, Prakash Sikaria, founder and CEO of Super.money announced on LinkedIn that a “new FD (fixed deposit) was being created every two minutes” on the barely 90-day-old platform. It was the first day of the Flipkart Group-owned fintech’s new investment product, SuperFD, which promised “equity-like returns” on FDs. Urging consumers to try it out, Sikaria, a Flipkart Group veteran, described it as a “super slick digital FD experience on UPI rails”.

Two months on, Super.money is attracting India’s young and affluent, the 25-to-35-year-olds—particularly from Tier-2 and -3 towns—who are probably making their first FD investment. The platform crossed 5 million transactions on Budget day, which Sikaria put as “customers celebrating the tax savings announced by the Finance Minister”. Without sharing specifics on volumes booked, the Super.money chief tells The CapTable that “there is a significant interest in people to have some part of their portfolios in FDs”.

The average ticket size for SuperFD is somewhere between Rs 40,000 and Rs 50,000, with most Super.money users topping up their FDs within a week of starting them. “When we launched, people were doing FDs of Rs 10,000-15,000, and now the average ticket size is at Rs 50,000. It’s a continuous upward curve. And we plan to launch SIPs (systematic investment plan) on FDs, recurring FDs, and other products now,” Sikaria reveals.

Super.money is mainly looking at early adopters, Sikaria says, and hopes that investors who are conservative but have a larger corpus of money will warm up to it gradually. “What we’re seeing is users are extremely price-sensitive in this category because they are investing from their savings. But as the younger investor pool gets more and more curious and comfortable with various financial instruments, they’ve started creating baskets [of equities, futures and options (F&O), mutual funds (MF), crypto, etc.] and are putting a fraction of their investments in FDs, too,” he explains.

This has seen horizontal (non-financial) platforms such as Flipkart, Tata Neu, Amazon, and Airtel launching embedded finance offerings. Alongside this, pureplay fintechs have mushroomed, with one cluster aggregating high-yield FDs and other fixed-income instruments (bonds, SDIs, etc.) and acting as third-party customer acquisition channels for banks, while another has focused on building B2B fintech infra and plug-and-play API solutions for banks, NBFCs, and e-commerce operators to go live with their digital FD offerings in mere weeks.

The first cluster includes several VC-backed startups like Stable Money, Grip Invest, Wint Wealth, Kuvera, Mobikwik, Smallcase, etc. The latter bunch consists of younger entities, including Fixerra, Upswing, EasyFD, Falcon, Tarakki, etc.

“The product is age-old, but people were limited to their own bank accounts until now. It’s not usual for a customer to open an FD in a bank in which they do not have an account. Now, with this basic banking product being facilitated digitally, they do not need to visit a bank. Plus, they can browse through multiple options and compare interest rates of their existing FDs with new ones,” Akshar Shah, Founder and CEO of Fixerra, tells The CapTable. “We are powering the backend of it, enabling this convenience and choice for the customer.”