muvin - Pocket Money App | Founders | USP | Business Model (2024)

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Neobanking services are revolutionising both the financial and Fintech sectors in India. Fintech ecosystem is gearing towards better usage of Artificial Intelligence and improving customer satisfaction with popular neobanks in India like- RazorPayX, Jupiter, and Kotak811, to name a few. muvin is an emerging startup that enables a seamless experience for teens which includes pocket money management, financial literacy, and understanding savings from a young age, amongst others. It is a pocket-money app that encourages children to learn to manage finances.

Read the startup story of muvin and know about its founders, business model, challenges, and growth.

muvin - Company Highlights

muvin - About
muvin - Industry
muvin - Founders and Team
muvin - Startup Story
muvin - Name, Tagline, and Logo
muvin - Vision
muvin - Products
muvin - USP
muvin - Business and Revenue Model
muvin - Customer Acquisition
muvin - Customer Retention Strategy
muvin - Challenges Faced
muvin - Funding
muvin - Growth

muvin - About

As India’s teen-centric pocket money app, muvin, offers a safe & secure platform to conduct online & offline transactions in an effortless manner- through its wallet, physical prepaid card and industry’s first RuPay powered contactless keychain.

While parents/guardians can create an account to enable their dependents/children with an independent wallet, muvin also empowers India’s college going students to set up their own wallets to conduct transactions.

As part of their focus on amplifying financial literacy amongst India’s teens, the muvin app offers an exhaustive library of enriching content to demystify concepts related to managing finance. They have onboarded Monika Halan, an entrusted Author and Speaker to curate and address theme-based topics in an easy, fun, and simplified manner. From taxes to what banking truly is, muvin is covering the fundamentals and more via rich byte-sized video and short blogs that are relevant for teens.

muvin - Industry

With new players entering this space, teen-centric pocket money apps and neobanks have become a competitive digital banking landscape in a short period of time. The space has grown exponentially in the last five years. In terms of transaction value, the Indian Neobanking ecosystem is expected to clock US$47.94bn in 2022 setting the foundation for substantial growth potential in the coming years.

muvin - Founders and Team

Mukund and Vineet have known each other for over 20 years from their time at Mindtree in the early 2000's. They share a passion for enabling access to banking services for the youth and believe that finance is a life skill that everyone should acquire by the age of 21.

Mukund Rao, Co-founder

Mukund is an accomplished business leader with experience across financial services and technology. Former Capital Markets Head at Mindtree, Mukund founded derivIT in 2007 and grew it across 7 countries with a team of 400+ employees. He subsequently exited derivIT to Luxoft in 2017.

After graduating from Bangalore University, he pursued his MBA from Ecole des Ponts Business School.

Vineet Gupta, Co-founder

Vineet has over 25 years of experience spread across technology and financial businesses, driving innovation and digital business models. Vineet moved on from Mindtree in 2015 after building out their Digital Business and subsequently founded a tech enabled NBFC focussed on business credit.

He graduated from IIT-Delhi and went on to pursue his MBA from IIM-Lucknow.

While both co-founders are actively engaged in all aspects of the business, Vineet looks after the Product, Operations, Finance & Technology functions at muvin, while Mukund looks after Marketing, Strategy and Business Development functions.

muvin - Startup Story

Despite India’s adoption of digital banking and contactless payments, the digital native generation still conducts over 80% of their transactions in cash. Both the co-founders, Mukund and Vineet, have teenage children who were using cash or their cards while spending money. They found the process of opening bank accounts for their kids and teaching them how to operate it within the restrictions on bank ATM/debit cards, rather cumbersome. The most common resort for parents like them was to hand over pocket money to their children. No wonder, teens often end up entering adulthood with little or no knowledge of financial management.

They saw an opportunity in enabling digital payments and offering financial products for this young consumer base- in an easy-to-understand, intuitive and friction-free manner. This is how muvin came into being.

They validated the hypothesis by empanelling Ipsos to conduct independent primary research of children and parents across 8 cities.

muvin - Name, Tagline, and Logo

muvin is a play on the word “moving”, where they would like their target audience to get moving and keep moving. The co-founders of muvin believe that Gen-Z is always on the go and they would like teens to get moving with their financial lives as soon as possible. The tagline, “payments for students”, addresses their audience and the core functionality of muvin, thereby avoiding any ambiguity.

muvin - Vision

muvin’s vision is to empower India’s 250 million youth with digital financial inclusion and financial literacy. muvin is unwaveringly moving forward in positioning the management of personal finance as an essential life skill and the need to inculcate it from an early age. muvin believes that India’s teens must be empowered to experience independence in their financial transactions and decisions in their day-to-day life.

muvin - Products

Bolstered by the pandemic, there has been widespread adoption of digital banking and contactless payments across the country which led to a permanent shift towards wallets, contactless cards, digital payment apps and other financial products. However, over 250 million teenagers and young adults in India are still precluded from not just financial education but banking services as well, conducting the majority of their transactions in cash. Gen Z are becoming financially aware and independent a lot earlier than a few decades ago. Pocket money apps for the teens are ideal in addressing their financial needs.

Deployment of new-age technologies like AI, big-data analysis and cloud computing is helping it to offer an easy-to-understand, intuitive, friction-free and education-powered experience to the teens.

muvin has partnered with the parent community towards its larger vision of amplifying financial literacy amongst India’s digitally savvy teens. It has also understood some other critical issues that matter to parents, such as tracking of their household expenditure.

Parents now have the freedom to transfer pocket money allowance (one time /scheduled weekly / monthly) directly in their child’s wallet who can then spend the money through the app or through their own prepaid card. Parents no longer have to stress over tedious banking roadblocks. Monitoring their child’s spending habits was never this easy.

muvin - USP

These are early days for teen-centric apps and they are in the first lap of a marathon. It is a new category and competition helps in both, creating and growing awareness about the product’s relevance and need amongst the key target user base. All the market players are addressing varied gap areas through their products, services and customer experience.

muvin is the first pocket money app to offer a RuPay co-branded keychain targeted at India’s teens. The keychain presents the most convenient and secured contactless payment mode with a simple ‘tap and pay on-the-go’ feature. The contactless keychain can be used across all RuPay NFC enabled merchants for fast processing and seamless transaction experience each time.

muvin also offers chat based banking on their website and whatsapp without the need of downloading the app. This allows customers to check their balance, view recent transactions, block their card etc.

muvin - Business and Revenue Model

There are no charges levied on customers for using the muvin services. muvin makes money from the interchange fees incurred by the merchant for card based transactions. Within the first six months of its product launch, muvin witnessed over 150,000 installs. Currently, the figures stand at approximately 50k app downloads every month.

muvin - Customer Acquisition

muvin’s journey started with the launch of its app and the ‘muvin card’ for teens in October 2021. In the same month, muvin onboarded Ace cricketer Hardik Pandya as their brand ambassador to propel its multi-channel marketing campaigns- a move which helped the brand to garner immediate attention and much-needed impetus from its target customers.

Teens need validation and approval from their parents/guardians and since its inception, muvin is consistently engaging with the parent community. Parents need to be assured on the trust front. muvin’s partnership with industry prominent players like RuPay has also helped it to strike a trust-worthy chord with the parents. Imparting financial responsibility as a trait has to be a consistent and an on-going approach. Parents are appreciating the educative, short videos and blog format content for their children which muvin offers on its digital platform. The early adopters of the muvin app have played an important role in expanding its reach amongst newer adopters.

muvin has adopted a multi-pronged approach in reaching out to potential customers. Developing a strong presence on social media has been key to building the muvin brand, as this is where Gen-Z spends a high percentage of their time. muvin is building itself out to be a young brand that teenagers can approach as an elder sibling or friend. They have also curated financial content in byte sized formats that is easy to understand and comprehend in under a minute. They have also partnered with multiple brands to serve their customers with offers and cashbacks relevant to their age group.

muvin - Customer Retention Strategy

To drive retention, muvin has partnered with multiple brands to serve their customers with offers and cashbacks relevant to their age group. They also run engaging contests and offers on the app which are refreshed on a weekly basis to keep their customers and audience engaged consistently. Through their insights led customer engagement platform and social media channels, they keep their users updated on the latest happenings on the app.

muvin - Challenges Faced

Neobanks and teen-centric pocket money apps like muvin have carved a niche category to address crucial consumer pain points which had not been addressed before. They have consistently channelised their energies to get their key consumer audience to shift from cash to digital transactions- which still continues to be a challenging affair.

Players like muvin get to interact with their customers digitally only which makes trust building especially amongst digital-savvy parents, a tedious and slower process. This requires utmost transparency and in this regard, muvin’s partnership with RuPay has helped them tremendously.

muvin - Funding

Earlier in January 2022, muvin raised USD 3 million in a pre-Series A round which was led by WaterBridge Ventures, with participation from India’s largest Venture Debt fund Alteria Capital and Krishna Bhupal, Co-Founder, Rational Pricing Technologies and board member of GVK Power & Infra.

Prior to that in April 2021, muvin raised a seed round of $1.5+ million from HNI’s Krishnakumar Natarajan (Managing Partner, Mela Ventures), Ambar Maheshwari (CEO, IndiaBulls Asset Management), Gani Subramaniam (Partner, WRVI), Shajikumar Devakar (Executive Director, IIFL Asset Management Limited), Sandeep Jethwani, and other prolific angel investors from the financial services industry.

muvin - Growth

muvin’s platform caters to India’s teens spread across leading cities in India. The brand is gearing towards engaging with one million registered users in the next 12 months. Its ambition is to enable 100 million financially literate students in the next 10 years- prepare them to confidently make the right financial choices by the age of 25 years.

With regular communication and feedback from their early adopters, muvin team plans to steadily enhance its product and introduce new features over the next two-three quarters that will substantially upgrade their users’ experience. To achieve additional scale, muvin is open to raising an additional round of funding towards the later half of this year.

FAQs

When was muvin founded?

muvin was founded in 2020.

Who is the founder of muvin?

Mukund Rao and Vineet Gupta are the founders of muvin.

Has muvin raised funding?

Yes, muvin has raised a funding of $4.5 million.

Is muvin app available on Google Play store?

Yes, muvin app is available on the Google play store and Apple app store.

Who is the brand ambassador of muvin?

Hardik Pandya is the brand ambassador of muvin.