Loading...
Loading...
If you run a fintech platform with a million-plus users, your product team has probably discussed Fixed Deposits. The logic is straightforward: your users already manage money through your app, FDs are India's most popular savings product, and the commission economics are attractive.
The question is never "should we offer FDs?" — it's "should we build or buy the infrastructure?"
Having worked with multiple fintech partners who've evaluated both paths, here's an honest breakdown of what each option actually costs.
| Line Item | Estimated Cost | Why It Costs This Much | |-----------|---------------|----------------------| | Engineering team (6-8 engineers, 6 months) | Rs 1.5-2.5 crore | Senior backend + frontend + DevOps for a financial product | | Bank integrations (3-6 months per issuer, minimum 3 banks) | Rs 1.5-2.4 crore | Each bank has different APIs, different KYC flows, different payment gateways | | Compliance setup (KYC, VKYC, consent management, legal) | Rs 30-50 lakh | RBI KYC Master Direction compliance, Aadhaar consent, VKYC infrastructure | | Payment orchestration (multi-gateway, retry, failover) | Rs 20-30 lakh | Razorpay + PayU + Cashfree + bank-native gateways | | QA and testing (financial product quality bar) | Rs 15-25 lakh | Financial products have zero tolerance for errors | | Total Year 1 | Rs 3-5 crore | — |
Bank integrations are the hidden cost center. Each bank has:
Integrating with a single bank takes 3-6 months of focused engineering effort. And you need at least 3-4 banks to offer competitive rate comparison. That's potentially 12-18 months of parallel integration work.
| Line Item | Annual Cost | |-----------|------------| | Maintenance engineering team (3-5 engineers) | Rs 80 lakh - 1.2 crore/year | | Rate change management and bank API updates | Included in engineering | | Compliance monitoring and regulatory updates | Rs 10-20 lakh/year | | Infrastructure and hosting | Rs 10-15 lakh/year | | Total Annual Maintenance | Rs 1-1.5 crore/year |
The maintenance cost is perpetual. Banks change APIs. RBI issues new guidelines. Payment gateways update their SDKs. Each regulatory change — a new KYC requirement, a VKYC threshold update, a TDS rule change — requires engineering work.
| Period | Cost | |--------|------| | Year 1 (build) | Rs 3-5 crore | | Year 2 (maintenance) | Rs 1-1.5 crore | | Year 3 (maintenance) | Rs 1-1.5 crore | | 3-Year Total | Rs 5-8 crore |
And that's for 3-4 bank integrations. Each additional issuer adds Rs 50-80 lakh in integration cost.
| Line Item | Cost | |-----------|------| | Integration effort (your side) | 1-2 engineers, 1-2 weeks | | SDK integration cost (your engineering time) | ~Rs 2-4 lakh equivalent | | Upfront setup fee | Minimal or negotiable | | Ongoing engineering maintenance | Zero — platform provider maintains it | | New issuer onboarding | Zero — platform adds issuers to the network | | Compliance updates | Zero — platform handles regulatory changes | | Payment to platform | Transaction-based — you pay only when FDs are booked |
The fundamental shift: You convert a Rs 3-5 crore capital expenditure into a near-zero fixed cost model with revenue from day one.
| Dimension | Build In-House | White-Label Platform | |-----------|---------------|---------------------| | Time to first FD booking | 6-18 months | 7-14 days | | Year 1 cost | Rs 3-5 crore | Rs 2-4 lakh (engineering time) | | Annual maintenance | Rs 1-1.5 crore/year | Zero | | Bank issuers at launch | 1-3 (after months of work) | 10+ (from day one) | | Adding new issuers | 3-6 months + Rs 50-80L per bank | Automatic — no work on your side | | Compliance management | Your responsibility | Platform handles it | | Payment gateway integration | You build and maintain | Included | | KYC/VKYC infrastructure | You build and maintain | Included | | Engineering headcount | 6-8 to build, 3-5 to maintain | 1-2 for initial integration | | Revenue model | Keep 100% of commission | Revenue share with platform | | Control over user experience | Full | White-label customization (branding, toggles, content) | | Risk | High (technical, regulatory, opportunity cost) | Low (pay per transaction) |
RBI issues circulars regularly. KYC requirements evolve. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act introduces new consent obligations. Each regulatory change requires engineering work, legal review, and testing.
When you build in-house, compliance monitoring and implementation is your permanent responsibility. With a platform, it's theirs.
Each bank integration requires an ongoing relationship. Rate changes, API version upgrades, holiday calendar updates, downtime coordination, escalation paths for stuck transactions — this is operational overhead that doesn't show up in engineering estimates.
Different banks mandate different payment gateways. One bank uses Razorpay, another uses Cashfree, a third requires its own native gateway. You're not integrating one payment gateway — you're integrating 5-7 and routing between them based on the selected bank.
Payment failure handling, retry logic, reconciliation, and refund flows are each non-trivial systems. And they're different for each gateway.
This is the biggest hidden cost. Those 6-8 engineers spending 6+ months on FD infrastructure could be building features for your core product. For a payments app, that's 6 months of delayed payment features. For a trading platform, that's 6 months of delayed trading features.
The opportunity cost of diverting your best engineers from your core product is real and often larger than the direct cost.
The buy decision isn't always the right one. Building in-house may make sense when:
FDs are your core product — If you're building an FD-first platform (like a deposit marketplace), owning the infrastructure may be strategic.
You need deep customization beyond white-label — If you need to modify the fundamental booking flow (not just branding), you may need to build.
You're at massive scale — If you're processing 50,000+ bookings per month, the per-transaction economics of a platform may exceed the cost of an in-house team.
Regulatory positioning requires it — If your regulatory status requires you to own the full technology stack.
For everyone else — which is the vast majority of fintechs evaluating FDs — the platform approach delivers better economics, faster time-to-market, and lower risk.
The buy decision becomes even clearer when you model the revenue:
| Revenue Stream | Typical Range | |---------------|---------------| | Per-booking commission | Rs 50-200 per FD booked | | Trail commission (AUM-based) | 5-25 bps annualized on FD amount |
| Metric | Monthly | Annual | |--------|---------|--------| | Users seeing FD product | 22,500 | — | | FD bookings | 1,125 | 13,500 | | FD AUM generated | Rs 5.63 crore | Rs 67.5 crore | | Revenue (at 15 bps) | Rs 84,375 | Rs 10.1 lakh |
At higher scale (5M MAU), the same model projects Rs 1+ crore in annual revenue.
The integration investment of Rs 2-4 lakh in engineering time pays back within the first quarter — even in conservative scenarios.
| Investment | Cost | Payback | |-----------|------|---------| | SDK integration (1-2 engineers, 1-2 weeks) | ~Rs 2-4 lakh | Revenue exceeds cost by Month 2-3 | | Opportunity cost (features delayed by 1-2 weeks) | Minimal | FD revenue exceeds opportunity cost in Month 1 |
Compare that with the in-house build:
Ask your team three questions:
Is FD infrastructure our core competence? If you're a payments app, a trading platform, or a neobank — the answer is no. Your core competence is your user experience, your distribution, your brand trust.
Can we afford 6-18 months of delayed core product development? Those 6-8 engineers have an opportunity cost. What would they build for your core product in that time?
Do we want to maintain banking infrastructure permanently? Bank integrations, compliance updates, payment gateway changes — this is ongoing operational work, not a build-and-forget system.
If the answers point to "buy," the next question is which platform. Look for multi-issuer coverage (10+ banks), true white-label depth (your brand, not theirs), compliance included (KYC, VKYC, DICGC), and proven scale (are major fintechs already using it?).
Blostem powers FD distribution for platforms like Zerodha, Jio, MobiKwik, Jupiter, and Upstox — through a single SDK integration. See how it works.
Get in touch with our team to discuss how Blostem can power your platform.
Contact Us