Travel dividend

A 4 AM IDEA TURNED INTO A BET ON HOW INDIA WILL TRAVEL AND SPEND —AND HOW REWARDS WILL TRIGGER MASS CREDIT ADOPTION

- AYANTI BERA

IN DECEMBER 2021, on a family vacation in Dharamshala, Anil Goteti found himself wide awake before sunrise, pacing the hotel lobby while everyone slept. After nearly a decade helping build Flipkart into the country’s largest e-commerce marketplace, he was trying to decide what to build next. “I was constantly thinking about what to build,” he recalls. “Then one morning it struck me, why don’t I build a card that rewards people for travel?”

That spark eventually became Scapia — a travel-and-credit platform anchored around a co-branded credit card with Federal Bank. Unlike typical reward cards that scatter points across categories, Scapia is built with a single objective of pushing people to travel more by letting them earn travel coins and redeem them seamlessly on flights, hotels and experiences inside the same app. “It’s a card that sits in your pocket through the year,’ Goteti says, “but the rewards nudge you to travel more.”