Finshots Daily
Original podcast
In today’s episode on 14th August 2025, we tell you about Jio’s entry into disruptive ITR filing and what that means for your data and wallet.
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Hello folks, you're tuned into Finshots Daily and in today's episode, we tell you about G O's entry into disruptive I T R filing and what that means for your data and wallet. Before we begin, here's a quick word from team Ditto. Life has a way of surprising us and not always in a good way. Sometimes it's a sudden illness or an unexpected hospital visit that can shake up everything. In India, families still pay about thirty-nine percent of medical expenses directly from their own pockets and just one hospital stay can wipe out years of savings. The easiest way to protect yourself is by getting a good health insurance plan. It's way cheaper than footing one huge bill. And if you're unaware where to start, book a free call with Ditto. No spam, just honest, jargon-free guidance.
Trusted by over eight lakh people for their health and term insurance needs. The link is in the description. Now, back to the story. Every tax season in India brings a choice. Some still walk over to the neighborhood C A who's handled their returns for years. Others log into the income tax department's website to D I Y it. And an increasing number now open an app to do all the heavy work. This year, you'll see G O Finance making that last option almost too tempting to resist. Yes, G O has quietly rolled out an income tax return filing app service for just twenty-four rupees and it comes with a shiny new A I-powered tax planning tool built in. So, why is G O getting into tax filings, you ask? Well, on the face of it, the timing's perfect.
The non-audited I T R deadline for A Y twenty twenty-five, twenty-six is mid-September. Online filing is smoother than ever and younger taxpayers are happy to avoid paper forms and in-person visits. The partner in this case is TaxBuddy, an online tax filing and advisory service, which means the service plugs directly into government's filing A P I's. You can file entirely on your own for twenty-four rupees or have an expert assist you for just nine-nine-nine rupees. Sounds like an unbeatable deal in the market where the next cheapest option starts around forty-nine rupees and C A assisted filings runs into hundreds or even thousands of rupees. But here's the thing, twenty-four rupees barely covers the payment gateway fee for G O because tax filing platforms have real costs.
They need to integrate with government A P I's, run servers, provide customer support, as well as comply with evolving data laws. In other words, the economics don't add up if you look at the filing as the end product. And if you go to the fintech strategy side of it, you'll see it as a loss leader. A loss leader is something a company sells at a price so low that it either makes no profit on it or actually loses money. On purpose, that is, the idea is to lure customers in with that too-good-to-be-true price and then make money later by selling them other more profitable things. Now, think about GEO. It has the largest mobile network operator in the world with about 498 million subscribers. So, when you file a return with GEO Finance, you hand over a goldmine of information.
Your income, spending patterns, investment habits, property ownership, even your preferred tax regime. That's exactly the kind of first-party data GEO Financial can feed into its growing universe of products. From mutual funds via its GEO BlackRock AMC, loans and deposits through GEO Payments Bank, to insurance via its new alliance partnership. And the AI-powered tax planner could also nudge you towards specific investment products or insurance covers. All of which turns that rupees transaction into a long-term revenue stream. Plus, the offering sits nicely with App's other services, which already has 5 million downloads and about 6 lakh active monthly users. Now, it's not only GEO playing this game.
Rivals like Qico, ClearTax, Tax2Win and MyITReturn have already nudged prices downward in recent years, often throwing in free filing for simple cases to pull users into their ecosystems. But GEO's pricing and branding is aggressive even by those standards. If this triggers a race to zero in pricing, smaller platforms without deep pockets or a ready cross-sell pipeline could get squeezed out. It usually starts when one player drops prices aggressively and others feel they have to match or beat that price to keep their market share. The end result is that everyone's margins collapse and the product or service becomes almost free. This is a classic Reliance-style disruption.
And if that happens, India's tax filing market and all the financial data it contains could end up concentrated in just a handful of corporate hands. Which brings us to another layer of concern: privacy and consent. You see, India's new data protection law, the Digital Personal Data Protection, the Digital Personal Data Protection or DPDP Act of 2023 has been passed. But it's not fully enforced and still in transition. The Act lays out broad principles. Companies must collect only as much personal data as necessary, clearly explain why they're collecting it, keep it secure and delete it when it's no longer needed. It also gives users the right to know what data is held about them and to demand its correction or erasure. All that sounds solid but the act's detailed rules are still in draft form and doesn't expressly
define what sensitive data is. Some enforcements are awaiting notifications by the central government and the government is working on drafting a subordinate legislation, that is DPP rules 2025, to provide a framework for implementation. Which means the legal guardrails for how long platforms can store your Form 16, AIS or bank details and how they can repurpose that data for marketing are still a grey area. So, companies can design consent flows in ways that technically take the compliance box but aren't exactly user-friendly. And this is where privacy experts warn about consent fatigue. It's that habit of clicking agree just to move on, especially when the service is dirt cheap. Plus, a recent PWC study shows that only 16% consumers in India understand the DPP
Act and 56% aren't aware of their rights to personal data. There's also the trust factor. For many Indians, a CA isn't just a tax filer but a financial confidant. Someone they believe will act in their best interest. In an app, the lines between advice and product promotion can get blurry. A deduction recommendation might be perfectly legitimate and also happen to funnel you towards the app's own investment products. And while that's not illegal, it's worth asking whether the advice is neutral or subtly shaped by a sales target. Of course, there's an upside for consumers. Competition could make tax filing cheaper and more convenient than ever. The geofinance app's regime comparison and deduction mapping tools could genuinely help
users save money, understand their taxes better and could bring in more unaccounted taxpayers into the system. And for straightforward cases, 24 rupees filing is a welcome break from the days when you had to pay a few hundred rupees just to have someone enter numbers into a form. Nevertheless, the broader takeaway is that in fintech, a price tag isn't always the full story. When a service is this cheap, the fee is seen as customer acquisition cost. That doesn't mean you should avoid it entirely but check what's included in the services, see how your data will be stored and used and be alert to when a tax suggestion doubles up as a sales pitch. As for geo, if this experiment pays off, it could set off a wave of copycat pricing, cement tax filing as a new UPI.
And maybe that might make your next tax return not just compliance ritual but the start of a very long marketing journey. Thank you for listening to today's episode. And if you want to share your feedback or suggestions, do drop us an email to [email protected]. Until next time.
Page updated November 11, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
