Sri Lankan founded Kashmi launches digital banking platform for East Asia
to the user in terms of far lower fees and higher deposit rates. Our most interesting feature is the PFM or Personal Finance Manager that offers online banking, bill payment, account management, budgeting and investment tracking. The PFM allows users to get up to the minute dashboard style graphical information on their account as well as advises on areas such as budgeting and investments.”
Kashmi was recently acclaimed by Fintech News as one of “Singapore’s Hottest Fintech Startups” and is on course to releasing its New Banking Application in early 2017.
“We are not looking at antagonizing traditional banks by competing directly with their current business lines. Quite contrary to this we are actually working closely to forge strong relationships with strategic banking partners to structure a mutually beneficial partnership where Kashmi is strictly regulated under their banking license and supported by their existing banking infrastructure whilst at the same time appealing to a user-base that is typically averse to working with traditional banks for every level of their banking activities,” said Rakhil Fernando, CEO Kashmi.
“Our dream was always to become the dominant digital banking provider across the South East Asian region. It’s undoubtedly a big dream – but then again just a few short months ago Kashmi was just an idea between four friends in Colombo and today we are the biggest peer to peer payment provider in Singapore – anything is possible!”
Ever since the mobile application was officially launched in the Singaporean market at the beginning of the year it has piqued the interest of a number of organizations and has been nominated for numerous awards including the SMART Awards 2016 for Asia’s Most Innovative P2P Initiative and has also been selected as one of Asia’s Top 10 Startups at the Startup World Cup.
“Beating over 500 other startups around the world and winning the Singaporean Government funded Fintech Startupbootcamp in 2015 really opened a lot of doors for us. From working with the regulators at the Monetary Authority to the biggest Banks such as DBS and UOB. The past year has been nothing short of a whirlwind and we are still coming to grips with how fast users are adopting to using the peer to peer payment platform – from people paying rent, to splitting dinner bills or cab fares, sports clubs using it to accept fees, freelancers and small merchants using it to accept payments, and families sharing household expenses through Kashmi.”
“Probably the most humbling experience was being invited to attend the Global Entrepreneurship Summit hosted by Barack Obama for the world’s leading startups where we had the opportunity to interact with everybody from Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Patrick Collison investors like Chamath Palapitiya, VC’s like Andresen Horowitz, and Secretary of State John Kerry,” he said. “I also had the opportunity to meet with fellow Sri Lankan entrepeneur Iqram Magdon-Ismail who founded the similar popular US based P2P payment application Venmo which was later bought by Paypal for USD 800 million in 2013.”
