Winding back the clock on 2021: Many sweet and a few sour memories
Roller coaster ride. Chances are you’ll hear the term quite often this year. But that’s what it’s been. There were ups and some really down-downs. It was a year that started with a lot of promise, toned down by Covid for a few months and a happy ending as it should be. Even as the Omicron threatens us in the new year, reminding us that we are still in the pandemic world, it makes sense to count the blessings.
The highlight for us this year was our much awaited offsite in April. Happy faces, laughter, zero-stress, bonding were some of the things that defined our first offsite. With a majority of our team onboarded during the pandemic, it was a much needed get-together. That apart, singing, dancing and party skills of some of our colleagues were quite a revelation!
While we came back safe and were still brimming with happiness and positivity post the offsite, the larger environment was starting to get gloomy. As cries for Oxygen and medicines came out from everywhere, we just couldn’t sit quiet. Medical stores were life savers during the second wave and we had several of them on our platform. Our team of engineers worked hard to come up with Co-aid, a digital resource to help people discover verified leads for Covid-19 critical medicines and equipment.
The second wave was a crisis, humankind had never before seen and we are glad to have played a small role in helping out those in need. Many of our colleagues and their families were affected too. As a people first organisation, we stood strongly with them, making sure they had the space to prioritize health and family over everything.
Tough times do not last but tough people do. The resilience and strength of OkCredit over two Covid waves is a reflection of antifragility and tenacity of its people. To reward their perseverance, we announced an across the board mid year salary jump in July. Needless to say everybody was elated. We doubled their joy further by revising our Esop programme, making it more attractive for our people.
This was indeed the year where people took centrestage. It wouldn’t be wrong to call it the year of HR at OkCredit, given the number of employee friendly initiatives we took this year, also mentioned in the last article.
We organised our third hackathon- OkHackathon 3.0 with the theme “Delight a user”. Teams within OkCredit presented several amazing ideas winning prizes worth Rs 3 lakh.
The festive season, like every year shone bright both for merchants and OkCredit. Our festive season data report revealed 12% higher than average repayments. Digital payments, the report showed, played a huge role in helping mom and pop stores recover credit.
Digital payments in fact, has been the feather in our cap this year. It’s a product that saw rapid scale up, thanks to adoption from merchants who were already using our bookkeeping app. OkCredit’s digital payment feature has made credit collection significantly easier for merchants who had to earlier rely on third party payment apps.
As the IPL came back in October, we didn’t want miss the fandom and excitement, having partnered the Delhi Capitals team last year. However, this year we wanted to do something different leveraging the IPL euphoria. The result was our first TV ads during this IPL season. Called VASOOLI KE PAINTRE, the campaign focused on the innovative ways that merchants use to collect their dues from customers and was centered around creativity and street smarts.
Besides these, there are multiple experiments we’ve been doing , some of which are set to fructify in the coming year. Topping on the cake — — we also received multiple awards this year, a validation of our work in mainstreaming the SMB sector. Moonshot startup of the year by SaasBoomi, BW Techtors And Entrepreneur of the year in service business are a few among several that endorse our work.
“Never let a good crisis go waste”, said a wise man. We have not. Covid has only made us sharper and more closer to our customers. The best part is- despite hiccups, we are still focussed and missionary in our zeal to empower the smallest entrepreneurs of India. We achieved quite a lot during the year, hence gratitude is the right way to end 2021. There are no failures, only learnings. #noregrets. Here’s to hope and positivity to welcome 2022.
