[Exclusive Interview] This Consumer Benefits Marketplace Is Nurturing A Win-Win Situation For Brands & Customers

Recently we interacted with Mr. Dhruv Verma, Founder & CEO, Thriwe, and asked him some interesting questions about his platform of consumer benefits.

Here are the highlights from the interview..

What is the idea of starting the business? 

Thriwe is a brain child of Founder & CEO “Mr. Dhruv Verma”- an avid golfer, who runs on the entrepreneurial vibe. Right from his childhood days, He had been fascinated towards that idea of having a business of his own. Back in those days, he was keen on doing something of his own, his baby entrepreneurial stints would include an architectural consultancy, retail personalised stationery business, so on and so forth.

While he was UK and trying to play golf, he was flabbergasted to see that he could book a golf game online viz a viz no platform like this was actually available in India. Hence, his fascination of booking a game online got him triggered and paved a way for his technology driven start-up “Thriwe” (erstwhile GolfLan). 

He thought of giving Indian Golfing space a leap by pioneering the technology aspect and getting it implemented at Indian Golf Courses. His whole idea was to connect the India Golfer with the Golf courses around the world. It was the innovation that totally revolutionized the golfing scenario and hence, his venture took a wheel of fortune spin. 

Today, Thriwe has diversified & evolved itself to become India’s leading b2b consumer benefits marketplace; aspires to become the market leaders in benefit strategy consultation space with “Benefits as a Service” platform and  be the go to name when you think of ‘benefits’.

Who all are the competitors and what kind of solutions you are providing to your customers? 

We have some very healthy competition at a global level. We compete with Quintessentially, Ten Group, Priority Pass & more. All of these are great organizations leveraging heavily on technology and trying to build a benefit ecosystem in the western part of the world. We want to ensure that over the next 3 years, we reach a size and scale where we are the market leaders. Thankfully barring South East Asia, none of these competitors operate in India, Africa and the Middle East and that is where we are trying to build and establish a unique position for ourselves.

Since Thriwe is a tech driven b2b consumer benefits marketplace that aspires to become the market leader in the benefits space with exclusive platform “BAS – Benefits as a Service”. Discover new engagement offerings that did not exist yesterday, everyday! Is a biblical line we go by. Our b2b offerings start from minimum 30% and enter a free zone of 100%. Our USP has been our exclusive approach towards data analytics which include study of HNI usage patterns, understanding of consumer demographics coupled with curating cost effective offerings. We have a network of over 1,00,000 partners across 130+ countries worldwide & these partners are across service categories such as sports, travel, digital offers, life style, dinning, and wellness. Basis our customer requirements, budgets, consumer demography, objectives, we create unique standout, benefit strategy. Our customer centricity has been the heart of our success. We scaled from golf into multiple categories because our client wanted to work with us across all allegiance categories because of the trust, integrity, constant innovation and high level of customer service that we offer.

How AI is helping to create a consumer benefit marketplace for premium brand? 

I would denote AI as a “Santa Hat” that every business can wear. The very essence of running a successful consumer benefits marketplace quintessentially relies on the basic understanding of the consumer buying behaviour, their demands, market trends and above all personalized experience. And all of this is powered by Artificial intelligence. The act of balancing out between the consumer’s  actual needs and their excitement is a key to a phenomenal business plan. Any company that is in consumer strategy space needs to create a harmony between curating an engagement that is cost effectively extravagant for a partner and deliciously delightful for a customer. For years, allegiance has meant giving “upto” 15% to 30% discounts & hoaxing customers with flamboyant offers with “asterix” just to have a cost under control. With Artificial intelligence taking the driver seat of allegiance ecosystem, we use our algorithm and studied the usage pattern of high value clients over the past years. AI gives invaluable data on customer patterns and behaviour. With chatbots which have near-human capabilities; the conversations with consumers have turned into empathetic one. Also, it is with the assistance of AI we are able to predict the purchase cost range of consumers and offer them products in their price range to boost loyalty for a brand. Our Mantra to our clients in financial segment has been constant that “You give great offers to engage and delight your customer and in return, we will manage the cost”.

How much the company is funded?

We raised our angel round from Gurgaon based Angel Fund-  YourNest fund in 2015. But, before that we survived due to the trust of lot of our family and friends. A lot of close associates who had seen us work in the past, they trusted and they put in their own money. So friend and family round sustained us, then we raised the angel round through YourNest fund after that we had another round of funding from Africa’s  Ison Networks in 2017

How technology has helped in transformation of business?

Here I would like to use a simile  – Technology has been same to our business as the invention of wheel to human existence. In an era, when we are used to booking our movie tickets online, hotels, airlines, food everything online. It was surprising that for sports facilities and golf courses we didn’t have that facility. We started of our business with main offering as Golf; the whole idea of which was to give Golfers an easy platform to book their game instantly and hassle-free from. And today, with technology empowering the business ecosystem, our business is no longer restricted to Golf but has built up on itself on the roadblocks of digitization. Thriwe, as an organization ventured in to the digital segment of aggregation; launched its exclusive digital platform, has become one of India’s largest tech driven b2b consumer benefits marketplace that offers a host of lifestyle benefits ranging from Golf, related sports, travel, lifestyle to dining. Today, Our allegiance services are being used by major card network companies, automobile giants, corporates, consumer electronics etc to facilitate their customer acquisition, retention & engagement requirements.  

 With the growth rate of 100% YOY, we aspire to become the market leaders in benefit strategy consultation space with BAS (benefits as a service) platform and be the go to name when you think of ‘benefits’.

What are future growth and expansion plans?

In terms of the future,  I think we are very well positioned to become the market leader in the benefits space with our exclusive platform which will be called “BAS – Benefits as a Service”. We will be investing heavily into technology and very soon we’ll be announcing the launch of our platform into the loyalty point space where we will come up with innovative ‘burn your points’ options such as: ‘burn your points for gold’, ‘burn your points for cryptocurrency’ and so on. Thriwe has always believed in innovating and coming up with ideas which our competition or the market has not seen before and we will continue doing that.

In terms of growth, we’ve been lucky, over the past 8 years we’ve been growing at an average CAGR of 50% and since we’ve transformed the company into a complete lifestyle play from GolfLan to Thriwe, we’ve seen us growing 100% Year on Year. 

We aspire to become the market leaders in benefit strategy consultation space with BAS platform and be the go to name when you think of ‘benefits’. For example: ‘When an automobile giant thinks that they should give tangible benefits to their customers they should think of Thriwe’. When a Financial Institution thinks they should give benefits to their consumers, they should think Thriwe and so should every name in the B2B world.