Can premium digitized vaults disrupt bank lockers?

A Bengaluru-based startup, Aurm, is building digitized safe-deposit vaults that offer a vastly different experience

- Shrabonti Bagchi

Getting a bank locker in India is not easy and usually involves years-long waiting lists. It is a sector ripe for digitization and disruption—and now, a few companies are creating alternatives. While Coimbatore-based Sakthi Financial Services operates premium lockers in the city under the brand name Svasya, these are still traditional lockers in the sense of needing locks and keys to operate. A Bengaluru-based startup, Aurm, founded by former MyGate CEO Vijay Arisetty, is solving this in a tech-forward way with premium lockers that rely largely on technology for security, identification and access. Mint spoke to Arisetty about his new venture:

What made you believe this was a pain-point you needed to solve for?

During my work with MyGate, we started looking into what else we could solve for residents of gated communities. A lot of them spoke about security, especially when it comes to storing valuables at home, and the difficulty of getting new bank lockers. There are several reasons for this—creating lockers requires significant outlay in terms of infrastructure and security, which many banks simply don't want to make. Lockers are not high-revenue earners for them while eating into their costs—banks want to become more digital instead of creating physical infrastructure. We looked at the Bellandur area of Bengaluru, where one pin code has around 50,000 homes around a 3-km radius, with seven banks to service them, of which only three have locker facilities. In our initial stages, we are focusing on gated communities that already have one layer of security, and are using common areas within these communities (like the clubhouse or basement) to create our secure vaults.