PhonePe was the first company that came to the campus and it was open to all the branches. It is a great opportunity for those who want clearing to get 6-month internship and PPO at the start of the 4th year itself. PhonePe conducted an online test followed by a GD and two personal interviews.
Round 1 (Online test)
The duration of the online test was 15 minutes multiple-choice and it included 15 aptitude multiple choice questions. The level of questions was medium to moderately difficult but the time factor played a major role. In order to clear this round one needs to brush up on the general aptitude questions.
Round 2 (Group discussion)
They shortlisted 55 students for the GD and 8 panels were made of 8-8 students each. The topic which was given to our group was ‘Importance of tech in finance industry’. The keys to clearing face-to-face this round were:
Don’t speak when a fish market is created.
Starting the GD also makes a minute’s fish good impact because there are chances that they won’t give time to
conclude the GD.
Find the pause and then speak immediately, starting with a bit higher pitch to grab everyone’s attention.
Round 3 (Personal Interview-1)
This round was a face-to-face, interview which was held on Google Meet. The duration of this round was around 30 mins. My interview was taken by one of the senior managers from the Safety and Risk Dept. As I entered the interviewer asked me to introduce myself. After I introduced myself with the details of my academics and internship that I have done, he asked me to explain my intern project and why it was related to data analytics. And then he asked me why I wanted to change my field from mining to analytics. Everyone from nontech branches should be prepared well for these questions beforehand.
After this, nontech he gave me 2 case study problems:
1. He gave me a scenario in which there is a person on call with me and he asked me to send 10k rs on a link and in return I can see the same amount credited to my account instantly. Then I asked him why should I trust you then he asked me to send 1rs in that particular link and then check the balance after that and I saw that 1 rs was credited to my account then he asked what had happened in the backend.
Ans: I tried but was not sure about the ans then he held me as soon as I had sent 1 rs in that account he instantly sent me 2rs back so I saw 1 rs extra in my bank account. This will help him to build trust and this is how fraud happens.
Then he told me to suggest some measures that we, PhonePe should use to detect the frauds. I suggested 5-6 measures like the pattern of txns, if a large no. of txns are happening then we should check whether it’s a merchant or user account, if the account was made and then a few large amounts txns happened and then no activity is seen then also it is suspicious. Few more like these.
2. He gave me the scenario where Ola or Uber like the company has started giving extra benefits to those riders who are completing more than 10 rides or x no. of rides in a day and we noticed that at a particular location say Bangalore, this policy is getting overexploited. So what might be the reasons for this or what is happening at that place?
Ans: I told him a few possible cases that can lead to over-exploitation of this policy: as riders might be taking multiple shorter trips to redeem this benefit, he might be asking his friends to book the ride multiple times, he might be working only in high demand areas, etc.
To answer these questions, few minutes were given to us to think and jot down the points.
Round 4 (personal interview-2)
This was also f2f interview and duration was around 45-50 mins and again there was a manager from Safety and risk dept. He started off with his intro then mine. Again I framed my core intern project into analytics project nicely. Then, he also gave me a case study regarding business growth. He gave me a scenario where a company intitally experienced growth for 1 year then saw continuous decline in the next few months. What might be the reasons for this and how would you encounter this?
a So I told him few parameters to check where the company is lacking. It could be customer satisfaction like the product which they are using is not satisfying them to repeat it and they are not recommending it to others. Second could be not fulfilling the KPIs like if we are doing marketing then it is not providing us expected results, or value proposition kind of things I recommended. I also told him that the interface might be complicated or login process is lenghty that is why they are getting less engagement and if it’s a company like Flipkart then delivery is not available throughout India or it takes lots of time to deliver. He kept motivating me through out the interview process and helped me to get into the conclusions.
After this extensive discussion, he asked me if I’m comfortable with SQL and powerbi since it was written in my resume. He asked me 4-5 SQL questions from aggregate functions, group by, order by and window functions like rownum etc by giving pratical examples. Then he asked me few basic powerbi questions. My interview concluded by asking if I had any questions.
Tips: it’s good to ask few sensible questions at the end of the interview. Always take some time to think about the solution and then jot down the points properly before answering. Be confident while you speak because the way of delivering plays a very important role in every interview.