Humble Beginnings:
Tartan owes its success to its founders Pramey Jain and Meet Semlani.
Pramey Jain has been a seasoned banker (IDFC First Bank, HSBC, Citibank, etc) before venturing onto his own. He has led various assignments related to data analytics & data science, delivering customer insights, building digital data-driven products, etc. Pramey Jain has done his BE graduation from BITS, Pilani, and Leadership Program from NUS Business School. Meet Semlani has also been a banker and worked with JP Morgan Chase in his previous stint followed by his brush with lending start-ups like Leap finance and Mpower Financing Co, a US-based fintech company. He’s been the first member on board and has seen the business through the lens of Marketing, Sales, Finance, Technology, Product, etc.
How it all started?
Pramey and Meet have worked together for many years and that’s how they were driven by a common goal of helping the gig economy. The idea initially started as a personal finance management app for gig economy workers. A peculiar problem was noticed from the point of view of these food delivery boys where they couldn’t manage their finances. With Covid, things got even worse for these people. With some personal experiences on this front with respect to their house help, it was identified that the offer on home loans was not much in favor of this working class of people. Through this idea, they planned to help these people not just in terms of finances but help them unskilled themselves as well, help them open upto the banks. The problem that was identified was much bigger and deeper. Working classes like these didn’t have a credit score. And banks and fintech companies would outright reject them of any such financial possibilities. The data problem was identified first through this insight.
Tartan is the genesis of this insight. An Individual’s employment and Income verification are what a bank really needs today when they want to make a decision about lending any loans or credit cards to an individual. The founders felt a sense of responsibility for addressing this perennial problem. Very soon the founders also realized that this problem extends to a large mass of the working population. Some intense research into this led to a deeper understanding of this problem and how universal it is across the length and breadth of the country. To give a perspective, out of 100 plus calls made to friends, colleagues etc, only a handful of people had a smooth experience in getting a home loan or a car loan. The problem was much bigger and more profound for the larger part of the group. And that’s how Tartan was born.
With great focus on the infrastructure problem, how this data can move from point A to B in a seamless fashion? And that’s how the Tartan product was built in June 2021. At Tartan, we focus on real-time data and verification (through a single API), enabling consent-driven income, employment, and identity verification in less than a minute. And this unique solution is built via direct sources like payrolls, govt APIs, etc.
We didn’t stop there. Birth of another big idea:
With 6 months into building Tartan, Meet and Pramey realized there is another unsaid, unattended need in the market – The employees. While the larger problems for companies were getting addressed, no one was providing solutions for the employees or the workers. And that’s how the distribution platform was beginning to get addressed in the form of Batik.
And this is where Batik plays a crucial role in engaging, motivating, and retaining people – by enabling you the choice of benefits that your employees will care for and appreciate.
Our partnership has grown to over 60+ brand partners and 120+ products listed on our platform (and growing). We empower over one million employees to have immediate access and personalized benefits that address their unique needs and help them achieve a stress-free life. With our unified employee benefits suite, we provide you with the best of Healthcare, Financial wellbeing, Insurance, Fitness benefits, and discounts that support talent acquisition, and retention and enable value-driven growth. Our clients include Lead squared, Tarrakki, HireTale, Celebal Technologies, Forte Fashions, Myntmore, Atliq Technologies. and many more.
With Batik, not only we are helping Banks and Fintech access data, we are taking the products from them and giving them directly to the employees. All this happens with one click.
The funding so far:
A total of 6 million USD funds has been raised so far.
The first of its kind data to distribution platform:
There is not a single company in India right now addressing the problem of Income and Employee verification directly from payroll or an HR management system. When it comes to distribution, no one is thinking about employees’ well-being as to what would keep them happy and help them retain them apart from work. Also, Employee Benefits today are loosely addressed from the point of view of leaves, insurance, power naps, free food etc which has no bearing on their competitive advantage. And that’s how the idea of a personalized data-to-distribution platform came into being.
Batik, today is a 1-click solution. Suppose any employee needs a loan through the Batik platform, the entire journey takes less than a minute. It’s that simple.
At Tartan, we are solving two issues at the same time. Financial services institutions need better verification of employees and their income. Employees need better options in the form of benefits with their companies. This also lends itself on a personal level for the employees with various customized benefits specifically curated by our teams on the Batik platform with a plethora of options to choose from. The products listed on Batik are simply unique. You will never find them elsewhere. These are specifically created and curated for our clients and companies for their employees. These listed brands are hand-picked and go through several rounds of negotiations only to cater for the well-being of the end-users (employees). And we want our clients to be assured that if a brand is listed on a Batik platform, it’s the best their employees can get. Right from a gym membership to a loan, we have a wide range of options catering to a varied audience. And we are the first in India to bring this kind of concept to Employee well-being. Some listed categories include: Healthcare, wellness, Gift cards, Travel, Loans, Gadgets, Consultations etc (and the list is growing)
We are our own competition
As such both Tartan and Batik do not have any direct competitors. This is pretty much an untapped and blue ocean for us. The value proposition offered by both brands is simply unparalleled and unheard of in the current scheme of things. The way we have managed to aggregate these varied brands/ products in Batik, there is no single brand in the market addressing this at a broader level, which gives us a solid competitive advantage. Similarly, for Tartan, there is no brand yet we can take head-on for competition.
The future is very bright:
Tartan is planning to get more investors on board. The team is very bullish about the future prospects of the business. Our goal is to become the go-to Data-to-Distribution platform for all the Corporates and Employees in India. We aim to become the KYC preferred data platform for a lot of Banks and Fintech companies. We are aware that we have built a strong and niche product, and given how the account aggregator ecosystems are shaping up in India, we want to firmly mark our place up there. While India is our focus market this year, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US are definitely in the future, depending on how soon we scale up the business operations in India.
With some major conversations with investors underway, we are poised towards scaling TartanHQ to greater heights by December this year.
