Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 2)

SM: What types of positions did you hold at Integrated Systems?

SS: I was with them for seven years and worked in a variety of roles. I started off in customer support, then moved on to training, international sales, domestic sales, product development, and marketing. Working in those roles during the formative years of my career changed my perspective. I really learned to understand what was important for the customer.

SM: Where did you go from there?

SS: I went to Xerox PARC. I had a marketing role there in 1999–2000. They are a company that is famous for every invention that somebody else made money on. For once there was a desire to come up with a product which was in the digital rights management space that could be something Xerox could commercialize or monetize. We did a bit of that, and eventually the product got spun out in a joint venture with Microsoft and formed a company called ContentGuard.

It was an exciting time. I was able to negotiate a major agreement with Microsoft which involved the formation of a new company. I met the CEOs of both companies. That lasted a little over a year and then I moved to a market development role at Portal Software, which is a company that is now part of Oracle. Portal Software had a unique product in the telecom billing space. The intent was to see if it could be rolled out to the media entertainment sector. Since I had experience with digital rights management I came in to work that sector. This was in 2000-2002. There was a lot going on in the online space. I got a deal with Sony Studios, Napster, Real Networks, Amazon and a lot of other companies.

SM: So the movement of portal software into the entertainment industry worked?

SS: To an extent. I think over a period of time the industry moved away from the concept of premium pricing and aligned itself more with the school of thought that iTunes used, which is billing per transaction. The need for an extremely sophisticated billing system never happened.

SM: Where does that bring us to in terms of your career?

SS: That was late 2002. Portal went through the downturn, so I experienced it firsthand. This was challenging but presented unique opportunities. I then had to decide what to do next. One of the things was that I got so caught up at work that I missed out on personal stuff. I had a son in 1996 and we had never taken a lot of vacations. We decided to do a sabbatical and go to India for a year. We put the house up for rent and went to India on vacation in the middle of 2003 to scout things out.

The cell phone revolution just started in India at the time. I think there were 30 million subscribers, and today there are 300 million, so you can see there has been a lot of growth in just five years.

I went to a show in India and asked the driver what time it was. He pulled out a cell phone to tell me what time it was. That’s when it hit me that he has a terminal on the other side. While I had had prior discussions about using cell phones as a way of sending payments, it became obvious that they were also a way of receiving payments. I came back and focused on mobile-to-mobile payment strategies. I focused on putting a team together to build a prototype and see if I could get some funding.

SM: Did you do that here or in India?

SS: I put the team together in India. That took about three or four months. We finally decided at the end of the year to move back to India. When I moved back, I initially agreed that I would be working with another company in the mobile space for about six months and had an understanding that after that I would go off and do my own startup.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy
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