Ankit Suri & Jessica Liu | Planto | DigFin VOX Ep. 68

Jessica Liu and Ankit Suri are co-founders of Planto, a Hong Kong-based fintech that began as a personal financial management app. It has since expanded to partner with banks around the region to help them with a variety of digital services.

Liu and Suri speak with Jame DiBiasio about how they have evolved the business, identifying customer needs, and trying to build an embedded kind of business in a market that does not have an open-banking culture.

They also discuss how they’ve been able to achieve profitability and what that means for their plans for the business. They also share some lessons for other fintech founders.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Ankit Suri and Jessica Liu, Planto
• 1:45 – How Planto got started
• 4:25 – Consumer pain points and account aggregation
• 5:33 – Does the app work?
• 8:15 – Embedded banking without bank open APIs
• 9:17 – Is there scope for advice?
• 11:26 – Pivoting to B2B
• 14:43 – What if open banking fails to take off in Hong Kong?
• 17:32 – New markets
• 18:26 – Funding, VCs, and profitability
• 22:23 – Planto’s future and founder exits
• 24:30 – Lessons for fintech founders
• 27:32 – Paths not taken