The world of cyber fraud has gotten even murkier thanks to a slick new tech service that is streamlining fraud for scammers and making them even harder to track down. This new concept is called ‘Mule-as-a-service’ or MaaS. It’s kind of like a plug-and-play fraud tech where service providers are able to  deploy an army of mules on behalf of cybercriminals. These mules are people who lend their bank accounts to move dirty money for cybercriminals. The scary thing is this mule network is getting smarter about leaving no money trail for authorities to follow.

More often than not, these mules are ordinary people from low income groups who sign up to make a quick buck, without realising just how dangerous the whole business is.

Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel are joined by The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan and Dhiraj Gupta, co-founder of the fraud-protection firm MfilterIt, about how this network works and why regulators have been struggling to keep up. 

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If you’ve ever taken a loan from a non bank or an NBFC, the EMI is usually auto-debited from your account every month. But if you missed a payment, you know what usually goes down. You are inundated with phone calls from your lender and maybe agents even start visiting your home. Not an ideal situation for you or your lender.

But now, your lender can just monitor your account and deduct the money as soon as it comes into your account…all thanks to that auto-debit permission you granted. Earlier, only a bank could do this when it lent money to its account holder. But now non-banks can do it, too. A fintech executive told The Ken that this tool will soon become business as usual in every lender’s tool box. But things are still not there yet since the banks are not predictably sharing the statement data or their servers are down.

And here’s where account aggregators come into the picture. These aggregators are a newly-created class of licensed companies by the Reserve Bank of India. They basically help businesses exchange financial information about a user after taking the user’s consent. 

Meanwhile, Navi Finserv, a four-year-old non-bank, was quite particular about how fast it could help its users take out a loan. Navi’s co-founder and CEO Sachin Bansal—who previously co-founded the Flipkart —believes “banking should be as easy as going on Swiggy and ordering food”. So to amp up both disbursals and collections, Navi and others like it are counting on account aggregators. But being able to access a borrower’s bank statement at any given time is a powerful collection tool.

And the problem is how Navi has been using this power.

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In many ways, electric vehicles today are where mobile phones were in the early 2000s. 

It’s December 2002. Mobile phones have entered the market, but the average Indian is still pretty sceptical. Cell phone connections are patchy and more importantly expensive. Devices themselves were unwieldy, limited and again…expensive. Basic services like sending a text, or a voice mail, or call waiting were considered ‘add-on services’ and they needed to be purchased separately. 

So most people thought it just wasn’t worth the investment. That was until Reliance came in and changed everything. Back then, Mukesh Ambani launched Infocomm. The idea was to make telephone calls in India as cheap as sending a postcard. And it worked. Slowly, as costs started to drop, more and more people saw sense in adopting mobile phones, and eventually abandoning landlines altogether.

This episode is by no means a history lesson. But that context was important. Because India is almost exactly where it was back then. Except, the device they are on the fence about is now electric vehicles. And the company in question now is JSW MG Motor. Funnily enough, the solutions that JSW is coming up with are eerily similar to the Reliance strategy back then.

It's biggest proposition? A subscription plan for your EV battery.

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Cloud, streaming, generative AI… while all of these are increasingly becoming hot topics of discussion, data centres—the large, boxy buildings that house high-powered computers—are looking for innovative solutions to stay cool.

The advent of GPU processing has opened an opportunity for a handful of foreign companies to throw their hat into the ring. Their proposition? Liquid cooling. 

So far, air cooling has been the preferred way to keep data centres cool. Like its name suggests, it is the process of using air to keep these centres cool. Liquid cooling does just that but with water. 

It’s more efficient and largely believed to be a better way of cooling. But change does not come easy. Many data centre operators here in India believe it is riskier than air cooling. But with AI technology advancing the way that it is and GPUs growing more popular, they may soon not have a choice. 

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hurun India began curating rich lists a decade ago. Now, it has moved up ahead of ranking giants like Bloomberg and Forbes with 17 lists so far. It has a Global 500 list, similar to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. In fact, at this point, its safe to say that it has replaced Forbes as the most trusted choice for bankers and wealth managers.  Hurun has managed to turn showing it off into a cultural trend despite the fact that wealth is often wrapped in secrecy in a country like India. So what's really driving India's obsession with ranking the richest?

Hurun India has grown way beyond its original rich lists, creating rankings for just about everything you can think of—from self-made entrepreneurs to top art collectors. They even track billionaires by zodiac signs. 

Today we look at Hurun India beyond just these lists— a closer look at the behind the scenes relationship it has with wealth-management firms, and how it keeps the ultra-rich happy

Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last Sunday, the Daybreak team joined a run club! Why, you ask? For research, of course.

We wanted to understand the recent run club renaissance, that has taken social media by storm since the beginning of the year. Run clubs, in the traditional sense, have been around for decades now. But now, something has shifted. The new generation of runners is younger, less experienced, and relentlessly social.

Young people are looking for new avenues to meet people in real life and to connect offline. This isn't just limited to running. Social clubs in general are really having their moment. These are clubs that are centred around an activity — like hiking, painting, reading, even knitting. In search of meaningful relationships, sometimes even love, they are putting down their phones and pursuing hobbies like never before.

But what led to this sudden resurgence of social clubs? Was it the pandemic? Loneliness? Social media fatigue? Or something else entirely?

Tune in to find out.

Special thank you to the 56 Run Club for collaborating with us for this episode. You can follow them on Instagram to get the latest updates on their runs and events.

Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

On November 13, food delivery giant Swiggy made its public debut. It listed with a 8% premium over its IPO price of Rs 390 on NSE at Rs 420 and was oversubscribed by nearly four times. 

While it's a bit early to comment, investors are not making strong bets on it yet. Hust to give you context, when Zomato went public, its IPO was oversubscribed by 38 times. This could be because the company is still posting losses on a consolidated level and is expected to be 2-3 years away from reaching profitability. It took Swiggy nine years till its food delivery business finally turned profitable last year.

Today, we revisit an episode of Daybreak in which we’d talked about what was happening behind the scenes of Swiggy’s IPO preparation.

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For quite a while now, the Indian startup ecosystem has really been feeling the pinch. People in the know call it the funding winter. These are periods of tremendous financial insecurity for startups, particularly now. 

You see, for the last five years ago, the startup funding culture here in India was like a rollercoaster that was only going up. But now the scenario has changed considerably. After a dream run, big-ticket equity funding has slowed down and once sky high valuations are very quickly coming back to Earth. 

These startups still need the money, obviously. But they have realised that raising a round of funding may not be as easy as it once was. 

But they have found their knight in shining armour. In comes ‘venture debt’. These are essentially loans that go to VC-backed startups. A lot of the startups in the Indian ecosystem are thirsty, and venture debt is increasingly proving to be the refreshing splash they needed amid this funding drought.

But there's a catch. 

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Last year, Nykaa decided to reshuffle its marketing structure after the company’s previous Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) exited the company.  

Instead of immediately filling the spot, Nykaa decided to break the role apart and have two marketing heads. One to look at performance marketing – the more technically, data-driven side of e-commerce, and another as the head of organic marketing – the creative, freewheeling stuff. 

The move sent out a clear message: a singular CMO is no longer necessary. 

This isn’t exclusive to Nykaa. Several online-first companies – Firstcry, Ixigo, Yatra – have been running without a CMO. But for decades CMOs have been seen as the charming, confident face of the company responsible for all things brand-building. 

What's changed? 

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last month, in October 2024, the government of India launched the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, a health insurance coverage for all senior citizens aged 70 and over, regardless of income. This is big news for healthcare in India because for the longest time, this is exactly the age group that has pvt insurance companies have been ignoring.

To give you a clearer picture, a person aged over 60 years pays anything between Rs 30,000–50,000  as annual premium for coverage as low as 5 lakh rupees. Even policies for Rs 6–10 lakh are harder to find and cost Rs 40,000–70,000 annually. That’s about 5X the premium someone younger would pay for the same coverage. And it’s not just the high premiums; these policies are of little help to seniors when they need it the most.

In fact,  more than four out of every five people aged above 60 aren’t covered by any insurance at all. Only 20% of those over 45 years have a health cover. And the rest are just out there vulnerable to emergencies. The reason being: high premiums and meagre coverage.

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Ever since the pandemic, the world of skincare has witnessed nothing short of a revolution. Almost overnight, that jar of Ponds cold cream that had stood the test of time on dressing tables across the country was replaced by elaborate six-step skincare routines.

The legacy brands we grew up with – the likes of Loreal, Ponds, Johnson and Johnson – were dethroned almost overnight. In their place came an explosion of new brands.  Today, everyone wants some skin in the game. Traditional FMCG companies like Tata, Marico, Dabur and Godrej all want in. So much so, that it's hard to keep a tab on the list of D2C skincare brands available in the market now. 

But what does it take to launch a skincare brand? Turns out, not a lot. All you need is a contract manufacturer, 30 days, and a penchant for marketing.

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We are hosting our first live recording! If you are in your 20s, like to run or just enjoy meeting new people, sign up for The Ken X 56 Run Club. This is for our Bengaluru-based listeners only. We meet at 7:30 am near Tonique on Kasturba Gandhi road.