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The Payments’ Business Masterclass | Akash Sinha @ Cashfree Payments
310 Plays3 years ago
A few years ago, businesses were struggling to accept card payments, and this demanded a solution that could enable the smooth running of businesses across the country.
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Akash Sinha, Co-founder and CEO, Cashfree Payments, a Bengaluru-based FinTech start-up which facilitates businesses in India to collect payments online and make pay-outs.
Akash is an alumnus of IIIT Hyderabad and has an experience of two and half years in programming with Amazon. In 2015 he started Cashfree in a bid to digitize Cash-on-Delivery payments. However, this PayPal and Y Combinator incubated venture soon pivoted to a tech platform that simplifies inward remittances and outward bulk payments for merchants.
Today, Cashfree has many reputed brands as clients in its kitty and supports more than 1,00,000 businesses with its product offerings.
Tune in to this episode to hear Akash explain everything about the payments business and how Cashfree is building the pipes for seamless digital transactions.
What you must not miss!
- Challenges faced by Cashfree.
- Addressing the customer queries.
- Competition between payment gateway companies.
- Importance of Neo banking.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Shoutout
00:00:01
Speaker
Before we start today's episode, I want to give a quick shout out to Zencaster, which is a podcaster's best friend. Trust me when I tell you this, Zencaster is like a Shopify for podcasters. It's all you need to get up and running as a podcaster. And the best thing about Zencaster is that you get so much stuff for free. If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the Founder Thesis podcast by using this link, zen.ai.founderthesis.
00:00:28
Speaker
That's zen.ai slash founder thesis.
Meet the Hosts and Overview of the Podcast
00:00:50
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated charter founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Stripe's Role in Digital Payments
00:01:07
Speaker
Have you heard of Stripe? It's a payments API company worth almost $100 billion. In fact, the most valuable, unlisted startup in the world. This is not surprising because Stripe owns the plumbing of the financial system for the digital world. It runs the pipes through which money flows digitally between businesses and consumers.
00:01:27
Speaker
And as the GDP of the internet grows, Stripe's business also grows. And just like Stripe, in India we have cash-free payments, which is building the pipes for all types of payments related use cases.
Cash Free Payments Founding Story
00:01:40
Speaker
Akash Sinha started cash-free payments in 2015 after spending two and a half years as a programmer at Amazon.
00:01:47
Speaker
They started by building an MVP to help restaurants accept digital payments for their home delivery orders. But soon after starting, they got incubated by PayPal and shortly after that by Y Combinator. And this was a game changer for them. Today, Cash Free Payments helps businesses to solve a whole range of payment related problems through a platform approach. And this conversation is a masterclass on the payments business in India.
00:02:13
Speaker
Loosen on as Akash gives a breakdown of various business lines of cash-free payments and their ambitious growth plans.
Initial Product Offerings of Cash Free Payments
00:02:21
Speaker
When we launched a platform, the version one, we had four products. We had payment gateway, we had payouts, we had auto-collect, and we had a split payment. Okay. Payment gateway, auto-collect, payouts, and a split payment.
00:02:43
Speaker
Okay, okay. And so payment gateway is the standard product which everybody else also probably had at that time, right? And payouts was what, like a merchant can link the vendors, like the merchant can pay multiple vendors with a single click, something like that.
00:03:06
Speaker
Correct. The larger use case was you can send money to
Focus on Payouts and Market Timing
00:03:10
Speaker
anyone. It would appear when there would be customers. But the use cases that we primarily support are around purchasing and sending money to their customers. There are a lot of products in the market are built in a way that they have to collect money from the customer. And once the customer does some work on the app, and then after a while, these guys have to disburse money back to the customer.
00:03:29
Speaker
Take an example of, say, a lending app. By the way, when you get loan from the business, and after that, you have to repay back to the business. Take an example of insurance curve. Initially, you have to bring your claim in. Then once you have to claim, once you have to get a claim, you get back from it. So there are a lot of such kind of mistakes in the market. And these all are very new, right? These kind of mistakes did not exist before 2014.
00:03:55
Speaker
they were in the market, but people were using older methods, right, just to use case. And just to add, so we take this product at a very right mark, at a very right time, the timing was very good for payouts product. And that also helped us scale it very faster and into so many business categories. Yeah, in what way was the timing,
Scaling with FinTech Growth
00:04:16
Speaker
right? That all of these business, like FinTech businesses were coming up, which had two way payment requirement, like not just
00:04:25
Speaker
A lot of digitizing was happening. The scale was also going. The product works well when you have a higher scale. Earlier internet companies were not having such a high scale. They just have to disperse 100 TMs in a day. For that, you can just use manual process,
Efficiency of Automated Payouts
00:04:40
Speaker
create a file, upload to a bank account, and it will happen. But today's world of digital insurance companies, they have to process claiming thousands.
00:04:48
Speaker
So the older processors cannot help them. The second is that a lot of these obsessions should also be error-prone. You miss an number, you miss an account number. Either money can be sent to the wrong guy or a wrong amount of money could be sent to the other guy. So both kinds of things could happen. The third is whenever there was a failure, you can never know the right reason. Right back to simply say, you know, connection failed.
00:05:14
Speaker
You don't know what to correct. You can just keep on applying, you know, making a guess. It was a very black box process for businesses. In a lot of cases, these things will impact the experience of the customer. Say if I am requesting for a claim and everything is processed from the company's head, the claim responsible, if it takes a total of four days, the customer will not be happy about it.
00:05:42
Speaker
It would be any operational result. So that's why people wanted to use the same product, which works all the time, which has scaled, which would be processed at high frequency. That's why it's coming fixed. And this was like a bank account to bank account transfer product.
Expanded Payment Options
00:05:59
Speaker
Correct. So the way it works is businesses who want to use periods, they have to park money in a restaurant on first.
00:06:05
Speaker
And whenever they request for a transfer, we use that pull-offment and send to their destination wherever they request. So very planned product, we only supported sending money to bank account. But over the period of few years, we added a lot of channels through which they can send money to, right? So they can also send money to a UPI address. They can also send money to a Visa and MasterCard, debit cards. They can also send money to wallets like your fear Amazon and Paytm.
00:06:29
Speaker
Okay. And how does the data of customers' bank details reach you? The company would be collecting it in their own systems and then that system will talk to you and so you will know what is the destination. There are two different kinds of processes there. So companies who have to disperse money to the customers frequently, so they prefer collecting it from the customer directly.
00:06:57
Speaker
And whenever they have to do the transfer, they can send us a bank detail as part of the request, could be API, could be the portal. But secondly, a lot of companies that we just have to collect the bank details once. It's an example of e-commerce, COD refund. COD refund is not very irrelevant. In most cases, companies don't want to have the operational headache of sending email to the customer by getting the details and then sending it to the cashier. Or they don't want to create a UI just for this worker. It's like a lot of bank investment.
00:07:26
Speaker
So we created a layer on top of payouts, we call it cash care. As part of it, the company can just tell us, this is the phone number of the customer who needs money and this is the amount I want to send. Cash free creates a unique link for that customer. We'll send it to their WhatsApp or SMS. A customer can verify the ROTP and they themselves enter the details where they want to receive the money to. They can enter the bank details. In the backend, we can verify with the bank account. It matches with the name of the customer which company told us to send money to.
00:07:56
Speaker
Once everything is correct, then we disperse the money within seconds to that customer. This reduces the operational headache of the entire process. Got it. Interesting. How do you reconcile name with the account number? You can ping the bank. We can do that. There are some facilities through NPCI or UPI. Some channels are there and use those pipes to identify that.
00:08:23
Speaker
Okay. And moving on, and in the future, not future, we are also in the process of adding a bit more verification. Say insurance company can tell us this is the name and this is the, you know, like, time number of the customer. Or you have to, I think you're saying that this time number should get dispersed money. So we can also ask for the time detail of the customer. We also verify the time details in the back end and they disperse the money. So we can do a lot of verification. But the idea was, how do I make the process effective and not just the last leg of making the payouts?
00:08:53
Speaker
which entire process should be more on autopilot as a business. This is not something just part of product, right? This is something you want it to work, but you don't have, you know, bandwidth to spend time with. Okay. Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay. Okay. So this is the payouts product. Now talk to me about Autocollect.
Solving Reconciliation with Autocollect
00:09:12
Speaker
So Autocollect is built on the, you know, entire bank transfer network, which India has.
00:09:17
Speaker
So even today, at actually five years back, there were a lot of businesses who wanted to collect money from their customer when they threw bank transfers instead of using payment gateway. But it's largely because of two reasons. One is payment gateway, the charges are always in percentage, right? And if you have to collect money of a higher ticket size, like in one night, a piece, five, or a piece, that paying 1.5, 2% is a slot of scrapability. Right. A lot of businesses don't prefer that.
00:09:42
Speaker
And second, when you collect money via payment gateway, you get money settled into your account after one or two business days. Many businesses were very heavy on cash. They could not pay it for in that much of time. So a customer paying and them receiving the loan. It's a land transfer. Even today is a very popular mode. So a lot of businesses would prefer receiving money via IAP or any FT instead of asking customers to pay via card or any other centers.
00:10:08
Speaker
But the problem there is, if I'm running a large business, let's say if I'm Samsung, or if I'm any larger mix vendor like Nandini, I'll have one account or I'll have two or three bank accounts at my website, and I'll share the same bank account with all of my vendors who are going to send money to me. Now, say every day you will get 10,000 credits from all the vendors. The money will hit your account and you will have all the listing in a statement.
00:10:36
Speaker
But after that, your problem starts because you don't know which of these vendors have paid their money and what is the amount which they have paid. So it becomes a very manual process for this case to just figure out who the customer was and how much money you have sent it. At this problem, you don't see payment gate. Your payment gateway is more like a put. But before you make a payment, you can tag the payment to order ID, amount, everything's locked. And as soon as payment is success, you know all the details.
00:11:03
Speaker
But in bank transfer, you are clueless. That lets you just do some manual work. So that was the problem we wanted to solve. And we thought instead of giving one bank account to all of their vendors, why don't we help these merchants and give tuning bank account details to everyone of them.
00:11:21
Speaker
If I did like 10,000 wonders, I can create a 10,000 unique bank account on behalf of the merchant, and it can be tapped to the right customer that I am onboarding itself. Okay. One of the customer sites went into that unique bank account, then we'll know that this is a customer, we'll also know the amount. And you can get these details at real time for that business. It's very similar to what you get. And they can also, you know, update their ERP or system and they can, you know, go out to their dispatch of service or product.
00:11:48
Speaker
So let's say we have done the entire process of reconciliation. You don't have to spend with hours or days just to know who paid. Also, they can do a lot of verification as part of it. If someone is supposed to pay 50,000, then you can make sure they cannot pay lesser. If they pay lesser, then we can reject the transfer so that the guy has to pay again. Oh, okay. And there are certain use cases where you want customers to send money to you from a verified bank account, say if a buying is stock or any kind of financial product.
00:12:18
Speaker
I, as a customer, did my KYC, then I cannot use my parents' bank account or my friends' bank account to send money. I have to use my own backside. So those are the checks we can do as part of the process. Business can tell us I should only get money from this person and this account number should be the source. And we can detect these two details when we receive the money. And if there is any mismatch, we can reject the transfer without even bothering the merchant, right? So they are full growth. And we make sure the process is set up.
00:12:47
Speaker
I didn't know it's possible to reject a transfer, like a bank can reject any of it. In the rejection, not very real time, money may leave your account, but it will get reversed in an hour or so.
00:13:07
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay. And so how does the integration of this work? Like whatever ERP they are using in that ERP, they can do some integration where every time a new account is added, like a customer account or something, then a unique bank account is immediately created by a cash free to give to that customer.
00:13:34
Speaker
There are two integrations they have to do. One is, whenever they onboard a customer, they can make an API call to our system and return a bank account number against that customer. The thing is, whenever we receive money from the customer, we send a webhook to their system. Now, they have to make sure they're handling a webhook to identify which customer is paid and what is the amount. These are just two integrations they have to do, which are very straightforward.
00:13:58
Speaker
If they don't want to do the integration, we also support email, SMS. We also give them reports at the end of the day. What kind of companies use this? Obviously, companies selling investment products would be using it. That would be enough. A lot of fintech use it, a lot of B2B companies use it. Companies in FMCG segment.
00:14:25
Speaker
they use it, companies in DMD segment, they use it. So wherever you have a use case of receiving money of higher ticket size, right? And you want money faster. Okay. And what is the fees here that cash recharges? Fees is pretty, pretty similar to what you pay for any of it. It's in fixed fee. Oh, okay. So percentage, even you're sending say 2 lakh rupees, you just have to pay 20 rupees for it.
00:14:51
Speaker
which yields a payment, you have to pay 4000 rupees just as a fee. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only problem here is someone has to push the payment, right? The payment gateway, it's supposed to permit, so the flow is easier. Right? In this case, how is the push the payment? There are certain friction, but depending on the business, this could also work. Right. Okay.
00:15:13
Speaker
We also work with a bunch of larger edtech companies of India. So whenever they sign up their customer, and since the edtech deals are like Android, and they end up charging for PK, it's MPK. So they use this product to receive money from their customers. Okay. Okay. Okay. So and they would probably prefer this to getting paid by card because again, lower transaction fees. So lower transaction fees, many customers may not even have cartered, that's also a problem.
00:15:41
Speaker
See, if you get a debit card from my PSU, they all put daily limits on your card, right? You cannot draw that more than 10,000 in a day. Right, right. There are a lot of challenges around using. So to make sure payment products are covering larger setup market, this is a needed product in the market. And this will stay like this for two or three months. See, there are countries that if you go to a lot of Western countries, they are very predominantly having a credit card.
00:16:08
Speaker
The entire economy runs with credit. Everyone can wait for six days, seven days just to get the money. But in India, a lot of businesses run on cash. It's a prepaid contract. So you need cash realization much faster compared to one waiting for a few days. There will be a larger change in the economy where everything moves to a credit model. And this kind of product will be needed. Market.
00:16:30
Speaker
But I guess something like UPI would have limited the scope of growth for this product, right? Because UPI doesn't have that 2% fees and you can, I mean, you can identify that a reconciliation problem is also solved, right? Like an ad tech company. True for V2C payment, you can use UPI. But two challenges, limit is a challenge.
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, sending 50k by UPI is not all the banks allow you to do. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That is one. And second, if you're missing money from businesses, let's say if I'm a military studio, most of my customers would be say, you know, shop owners, and they don't want to send money from that, you know, companies that don't. If you cannot link the OPI to a company's account, UPI is capable of link to retail account to send money.
00:17:23
Speaker
This product has grown a lot after UPI, right? Because earlier, before UPI, you had to log it to a bank portal, you had to add a manifestation, then make a payment. Right now, if you pick up any UPI like Google before, you'll see an option to send money to any bank account. So you don't have to go to a bank portal, you can just open UPI, enter the bank account number, and send money instantly without being a beneficiary.
00:17:46
Speaker
Actually after UK, this has become a bit more popular due to what we saw earlier and split payments. Split payment is very valuable for anyone who is running a marketplace business. So there are two kind of internet companies, you see one which is very inventory-like.
00:18:02
Speaker
Literally, it means the business itself is owning the entire inventory, right? Someone like Apple, right? If Apple is selling online, they are the one who's manufacturing it. And then your companies like Amazon Flipkart, who are marketplaces, and who have all kinds of selects on the platform, and they are just also facilitate marketing logistic image, but they don't manufacture or own the product. So now when a marketplace is receiving orders from the customer, right? As a customer, I can place three for products, you know, at a time, right? My orders could have products, and all those products could belong to different sellers.
00:18:33
Speaker
But as it estimates only making a one payment because you know, that's how the model is. So that means payment of 10,000 rupees to give the marketplace. Now the marketplace has to distribute the 10,000 rupees among four different sellers because those are the products I bought. And also they have to, you know, keep the commission out of everything, right? And every product would have different commission, right? Say an electronic item could have sent person commission, like the books could have some people's commission. These are just examples I'm taking. But commissions vary.
00:19:03
Speaker
Just to manage the entire processing of payment is also a very tedious task for a lot of the businesses. There is also one more larger picture. As per RBI guidelines, when you're running a marketplace, you cannot bring your customer money into your current account. You have to open a special kind of account with a bank and that account gets audited by RBI every three months. Okay.
00:19:26
Speaker
So you have to open a nodal account, customer money comes to the nodal account, you do the calculation of the commission, and you use that total amount to send money out to the sellers. And you just bring the commission back to the company's current amount. So there are two challenges. One is operational secondary regulatory. And these two challenges are like a uphill task for a lot of middle-level companies. Some of those very large can afford to do by putting say a 20-member team.
00:19:52
Speaker
And again, even for them, it's not very easy to process, but they can still, you know, fight this kind of battle. But someone was slightly smaller, right? I mean, they cannot do both of the work, and then we cannot arrive with SLA. And thirdly, this is not something which aligns with the business growth at all, right? I mean, by doing a great job of this work, I cannot require four customers.
00:20:15
Speaker
This totally doesn't align with the place where they want to invest their time and energy. That's where a split payment product comes in, a used cash repayment gateway. Whenever the order is being placed, you tell us which of the sellers are part of this order and how much money they should be getting out of this order. Marketers can tell us a seller rate should get 30%, seller rate should get 40%, seller rate should get 20%. Whatever is left out is my commission. Now, once we receive, say, 100 rupees from a customer and when we have to settle the money, we will look at this logic again.
00:20:45
Speaker
we create in a four different pockets of the customer one, and we can directly send money to the sellers from cash flows in a normal account. So this reseller is being compliant with the RBI title, and second, they don't have to take the operational head up of sending money to the sellers on time, right? So marketplaces can adapt to the reseller, they can adapt to the compliance, and they can focus on more productive tasks, which engross the business.
00:21:08
Speaker
And they don't need to run a total account. Exactly. They're not touching the customer money even in this scenario. So this would be like an add-on to payment gateway. Any commerce company using Castries payment gateway can take this as an add-on. It is an add-on.
00:21:29
Speaker
Even we have certain, certain more features for it. If you are collecting COD payment from the customer, we can still make this product work, right? So that you have the end-to-end display, but still there's a COD order, we can do the computation, and you can find the account to send money to the setup. So there are ways to use it for all the orders, not just for each order. Okay. Do you have some product for helping in COD also?
00:21:54
Speaker
How does COD work typically? Like the delivery boy is taking cash. How does that become digital? So it's large-minded lot of companies, right? So all the logistics companies, they receive the money from customer and then they can sell it back to the marketplaces.
00:22:10
Speaker
So we are not wearing the last leg of the COD because there are a lot of cases of cash free is to have a cash free policy. Yeah, right. And we cannot get on like more elite hit product which enables more cash. But having said that, we still work with a few of such logistic companies. So one cash hits their account, then they can use a payout system to send it back to the marketplaces to work with them. Okay. So that kept us at the end of the process. And second, we also play a role on the COD refund, which I just mentioned.
00:22:38
Speaker
The customers purchased something in COD and now they're testing for refund after four or five days. We can help you make the journey simpler and to get you to the customer.
00:22:47
Speaker
I've also seen sometimes when I order a COD product, I get an SMS with a link that the delivery was on its way, and if you want to pay digitally, then use this link. Is that something that you also do? We do with the loyalty companies. We're also thinking about certain products around how do we reduce the COD. Because if you think that COD is a market, I mean, customers don't pay COD because they don't know how to pay online, right? That's not the assumption there.
00:23:14
Speaker
All of the customers who look at business like Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, any internet user knows how to make an outlet limit. But the challenge is they're not sure about when the product will reach. It's a trust gap. A trust gap is much higher if you shop from any website. If you shop from Amazon clip-cut, these guys are very scalable, they're dire.
00:23:36
Speaker
Not like mechanism to address complaint mechanism to inform you when there is a DA. But not the small companies don't have an infrastructure to do a great job. Because they are very yuck. I get a lot of such younger companies see higher Saudi orders because customers don't have interest.
00:23:53
Speaker
So we as a payment company are aware of this challenge, and we also are working on certain solution which can help to reduce the security. Something like H2E as entity can establish some trust so that customers would be encouraged. Like escrow kind of a service, like it stays with you until the product is delivered or something like that. Something like that, but again, we also want to make it more section three, right?
00:24:22
Speaker
If another customer I know just can press a button, I may not even take the fault of protecting this group unless that is incentive involved. So we have to make it more like a incentive remainer scheme instead of just people behaviors and it would be hard if customer doesn't have one. But that's a big and a problem to be solved, I think. I'm sure many companies are trying to do that.
00:24:46
Speaker
We will also have our own approach and eventually, we may reduce the... Actually, after the pandemic, COD production is reduced because no one wants to give cash to the delivery boy. But there is one phenomenon emerged. These days, when you place a COD order, no one pays cash when they're receiving it. Everyone uses COD to go pay for it.
00:25:06
Speaker
So people are paying digitally on the doorstep, so you can call it COD, it's for like digital payment. It's more like pay, pay OD, like pay on half, pay on right. So that's the model. So even there, we have seen a lot of companies giving, you know, hardware to pass machines to their delivery boys. But you might have seen it, they're looking there. And there they have a challenge about signal, they have a challenge over maintenance. Imagine you have this great 10,000 devices in the market.
00:25:36
Speaker
If 50 of them become faulty, right, then you have to enable it, bring it back to my center. That's a big headache. A signal is a big problem, right? A lot of high-rise it's built-up. You don't get strong signal. Even though you have signal on your mobile phone. So we have built-up product to address this challenge. So Kashi is a built-in solution called Kashi Epos. As part of it, you can just install Kashi app on your Android mobile phone.
00:26:03
Speaker
and you can accept card payment from any customer options. Basically, you store cash to be at an Android customer. There's only one requirement, customer has to have a card which is NFC enabled. If customer card is NFC enabled, they can simply tap it and payment will go through. This reduces the entire thing because it's distributing so many hardware. No maintenance limitation, no signal issue.
00:26:28
Speaker
Okay, so we have also done a work around, right? If customer doesn't have any senior, but we also give a very small device, which cost less than $10, right? And $600. So you can also carry small device that is connected to the customer can dip their card on that. Yeah, which is just a card reader. Very dumb card reader, right? And which is like one by one. No maintenance, if it breaks down, you'll buy a new one. It is very simple. That's it.
00:26:52
Speaker
with hardware costs from 50,000 rupees. I mean, there's a lot of investment, a lot of capex in its stock. This has also been released very recently, right? So today, we can support Tap and Pay from, you know, like your big card, Visa card, and this quadrant will do a slightly bigger launch. And we hope to bring a change in the entire pay on delivery market.
00:27:13
Speaker
But because I don't think behavior will change a lot very fast. Just that she can make it more digital. Then it's still a good thing for people. It's also the convenience for the customers. For this EPAS, the customers would essentially be logistics companies. They take care of collections. What is the last one delivery?
00:27:40
Speaker
But we use it in a lot of different kind of moving problems. If you are organizing events on offline stage, and a lot of people are going to buy a ticket. If you just have one machine, you'll have a very larger queue. But if you can give this app to ten of your volunteers, you can create many stalls they want, and they can accept the payment. We can really make it useful in a lot of use cases where there's a queue problem.
00:28:06
Speaker
If you pay your visa fee, if you pay your school fee, because there is a supply issue. I mean, as a business, they cannot have, you know, they can max of two hardwares. And if you go to the restaurant at that time, we have to wait for 5 days and get a card machine in front of you. Because they cannot apply. And with this solution, they can give this app to all of their mates, all of their servers.
00:28:27
Speaker
In server-scared, bring the bill and bring the card machine, you know, that can without any life. Got it. Okay. What other products are there that we've not discussed so far? We've discussed payment gateway, payouts, autoclax, grid payment, and Epos. Payment gateway, we haven't discussed, I think. I'd just like to speculate, say. So, payment gateway from oxide looks like a very simple state-of-the-art product. But underlying, you know, movement, payment gateway is one of the most complex product with payments, and I'll just put it on record.
00:28:54
Speaker
It's much more complex in the back-end because you have to deal with so many payment modes. A lot of these payment modes keep on changing. Everyone will upgrade their system, they'll have their own downtime. So job of a payment agreement becomes very important in terms of how do I keep everything active all the time? How do I have more backups? How do I be ready with any kind of updation?
00:29:15
Speaker
So, the end machine doesn't have to worry about any changes happening in the world. Imagine if you use a mobile kind of thing. You don't care which car will come. You just want to have someone to send you from a restaurant. Same thing except even gateway. I don't care what you use in the backend. I just want to receive money from the customer.
00:29:35
Speaker
Now you do the hard work. As a writing, I cannot say no, I have less number of cards, or my car is broken, so I cannot execute this. Similarly, we also can't do excuses, there is a downtime with this website and process the transaction. So we have to do a lot of heavy lifting the back end, right, make sure, you know, things work all the time. Of course, you're also working with a lot of features which will give delight to the festival. Like give me examples.
00:30:01
Speaker
If you talk to any internet companies, 20-50% of their queries are around money. Either I paid them money, my bank has been debited, but you haven't accepted my order, or I have requested for a refund, where is my refund, I cannot price that account. It will be shown on without dispute or anything. It's more than 50-60% just around money. And if you have to, if as a company you have been trusted user, then I have to solve the money problem.
00:30:27
Speaker
Because that's where the complaints are. Sixty-one complaint is a huge part of the e-commerce company. If I can solve money problem, then I'll have more trust, I'll have more LDB from the customer, and I can have a good brand in the market. Today, if you think about any internet, there was a good brand. Number one thing, people can say, I feel safe with the product because my money is safe with it. It's not about giving me a great product. A lot of giving me a great product. But they're very comfortable saying whatever names you may take.
00:30:57
Speaker
This is something we want. We added a bunch of things. We created an instant refund product. We created a faster de-cancellation. The customer wouldn't pay within five minutes. If you couldn't accept the order within five minutes of payment, then we refund the transaction automatically to the customer so that they don't have to come in and place a customer query. If they have requested for a refund without receiving a product, then you can send it out within a second instead of processing through all the verticals.
00:31:27
Speaker
Right, so what would happen if your customer will send tickets to a customer service agent? Customer service agent will raise a ticket to the internal finance team or internal operations team. That's enough work.
00:31:40
Speaker
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00:32:00
Speaker
So, this can be made like completely self-service, like a customer just says, cancel order and... Exactly. The system can detect, you know, you haven't despite the service to initiate the refund, but just make an API call, initiate the refund, because we'll get money within five seconds. So, we have things that are instant refund, pre-authorization. So, we have built things around this pre-authorization.
00:32:24
Speaker
Pre-inspired TV is for normal payment gateways, right? So when you're placing order as a customer, my accounts get debited, and it is on the way to a 50% merchant account, and next time merchant owner receives the money. But in pre-inspired TV, we don't debit the customer account, we just block money in their account. So money never leaves your account. Because there are certain use cases, or not use cases, where you want to debit the money when you've actually given the service or product. It takes up all of the airline industry.
00:32:52
Speaker
Also, in India, the travel industry sees a lot of, you know, cancellation, same-day cancellation. You have a flight today, but by the end of the day, you feel like, you know, for some reason, an accurate order, and then I'll request for refund. So, in older cases, since money has left your account, the refund will go through its own, you know, cycle. And this is what I'm talking about before even we released this refund as a product, right? This is pretty standard fund era. Right, it used to take five to seven days, right, even though you have cancelled the order on the same day.
00:33:20
Speaker
With this pre-watch technology, I mean, since money has never left the account, I just have to remove the block which I put in the customer. The customer has the money, ASAP. Second requirement is when you check-in in a hotel. A hotel will simply put a block on your card. You must have seen it. Whenever you keep on ordering whatever you want, end of the day, they'll just stop it. And here's the rest of the money. We have a similar requirement. In online world, we do not have such kind of product.
00:33:46
Speaker
We are the first company to make it available. I mean, this was supported by Visa Mastercard for a lot. But in India, this was not something online PG used to support in the market. So even though we started PG as one of the late covers, but because of all this innovation, we have been able to give a very great experience to the merchants in the market.
00:34:07
Speaker
That's why we have been able to succeed even in this very crowded PG market, you know, with its, I don't know, four or five years. And the theme is, look at the market, understand what customer problems are, build features, support it, and then send to businesses. At the end of the businesses, listen to what the customers ask from them. And that is a way to grow this kind of B2B2C product. Okay.
00:34:28
Speaker
How do you collect requirements of customers? Like you're saying that, listen to what they want and build it for them. What is the process of listening? The start of payment says everyone, even I am a customer of payments, right? So I can relate with a lot of requirements which I see on day-to-day basis and try to fix it.
00:34:50
Speaker
A second is obviously there might be certain services which I do not use at all. So in those cases, we talk to those merchants, we meet with them frequently. They can bring this the end of the day, we just need customer feedback. So they can also bring market feedback saying my customers are lucky for this kind of solution. Can you build? Can you do something around it?
00:35:08
Speaker
So these are two ways we understand the feedback. In a lot of these cases, we had since built a solution because we had an understanding of the market and this is a very universal department. And then we went back to the customer. We have to build an innovative product. You cannot wait for a customer to come and tell you this is what I need. Yeah, if you spot a gap market.
00:35:29
Speaker
This is what we did, right? Be a doctor, no one came and told us this is what we need because how can you imagine a product? That's not what people can do so easily. They can investigate, they can tell you the problem, but they cannot imagine a product around it. And that's the job of most tech companies.
00:35:48
Speaker
And this is something a lot of companies are hard to do. I look at Intel, look at it. That's all I call the problem. They're not waiting for someone and coming to me fast. They already know the data usage is increasing, spawning, freezing. I have to pay the fast CPA. Similarly, we also track a lot of macro trends, how things should be after five years, how the behavior will be, and we have to start preparing our look for that. So one concern I've often heard from
00:36:11
Speaker
founders of D2C businesses is failure rates in pavement gateway. Can you talk to me on what are like industry norms of failure rates and what you're doing to improve that? See, failure rates have happened due to multiple reasons. Imagine you're a D2C company and selling to a tier 2, tier 3 city. This entire different system is not how much it is.
00:36:38
Speaker
It's for receiving card from a certain bank. It's a lot of bank to keep online and use it disabled by default. And the customer is not aware of it. You try it 10 times, we will never get a question about their money. So that's where we see issue. Second issue is because of 2FA, right? I mean, OTP may not reach to all the customers once a time and there will be XOTP expiry. Third is the card that declined because of the risk nature of the customer.
00:37:03
Speaker
I would say if you are just having fights over rupees and you try to make a 4,000 rupees of payment, a lot of banks don't see the usual activity. I just took an example, every bank has their own dress code. But that's the reason we see a decline from the bank. That's a whole other thing. So these are something which a payment company cannot solve unless they own the entire end-to-end system, which is not very favorable.
00:37:28
Speaker
Right, but what we can do is offer a lot of modes, even though my card is failing, I can still use nuclear, I can still use payload, I can still use wallet, and that's how we can try to increase the conversion for people. Right, but giving them more options. There are challenges in the market, which we cannot control unless there is a very increased awareness in the market.
00:37:49
Speaker
which is not the case today. You can just do a survey talk to even DA2CT. They cannot know if they can use a debit card online. And what are like typical industry norms of failure rates like for e-commerce kind of transactions? I think for credit cards that catch free or acceptance rate is more than 86-77% for standard card transactions.
00:38:14
Speaker
And if you remove this customer problem, then it's support of 95% and 7%. These are the errors we cannot solve. But are there also like technology related errors?
00:38:28
Speaker
He entered the OTP, but for some reason it failed. But these are like mysteries for... That's why few payment gateways are better than the others. Scene payment gateway can build a better technology. They can have more atomicity around transaction. They can handle a large set of transactions at the same time.
00:38:46
Speaker
Suppose you want to handle 10,000 transactions in a minute. So a lot of times, the system and payment gateway itself fails. Again, on-mode has many customers because that's a worldwide purpose. For technology, it cannot support so many concrete transactions. I cannot process that transaction. So a lot of times, this transaction gets declined with the VG itself, the payment gateway itself, and it customized for the drive. And that is where we can do the best job when reducing that gap as much as possible.
00:39:12
Speaker
But second is, we just can also predict when the connection is going to fail. That's what we also do. Suppose I know a state dog of India or any bank of India. It's not working good for the last two hours. I can always go and tell a customer, since you have this card, and only a customer may have two or three cards back. You should use a card of this bank. You should use a card of some other bank.
00:39:35
Speaker
By doing those predictive work, we can increase the conversion for T2. You said more atomicity. What does that mean? It means what the transaction is happening. Once you get a confirmation, the system should be able to listen to the confirmation. Because these are very asynchronous processes.
00:39:56
Speaker
When there's confirmations coming and your system couldn't read it, then in these cases, customer account has been debited, but your system couldn't capture that transaction. And even those cases, the order will not get confirmed. You have to measure what kind of transaction you have initiated with the card scheme. You are in position to be sent back to the request. If you don't make false reports, it should happen accordingly, but orders will not get pressed.
00:40:18
Speaker
You might have seen it, right? When you come back to a page and you say, you know, page not found or something went wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah, something went wrong, yes. Some couldn't listen to the feedback. And then you have to get into this in that process of defending that on the extra, not asking much and to approve it. And this is all, you know, like spoil the experience.
00:40:39
Speaker
This is like a problem that you can solve by having a good tech team. Like, this is a talent issue. Yeah, talent is starting, but that's not something you can build overnight, right? You have to understand all these problems, right? You should have insight of data. And this takes certain time to have a very standard instability. And they say we have to keep on improving, right? Because the traffic is growing, right? If tomorrow traffic is 100% more, right? I cannot use the same system. So I as a company have to keep on revamping my system, which we actually have done it.
00:41:07
Speaker
Back in 2015-16, we had a very standard system. We are making more modular, more such architecture, having more fault tolerance around all the systems, even separating databases for the system. How does the data help you reduce failure rate? You're saying the more data you generate, then you're able to identify that, okay, this is a point of failure, and then you're able to investigate and fix it.
00:41:32
Speaker
So we can predict, right? So there is one thing we have noticed. So when you proceed on the action, you work with one of the acquired banks, and card could belong to any of the insured banks. Plus, what we have seen at banks, acquired bank may not have up to date knowledge about the insured card. And it's supposed just as a very example, right? Suppose SDFC has started issuing card with a new serial number, right? Whenever you get a six digit card, first six digit or a digit defined, we call it bit, right?
00:42:00
Speaker
If a bank starts issuing a card with a new bid and the acquired bank hasn't updated their bid database, then they'll say, this is not a valid card number. I cannot send it to for further processing. This is the information we have to keep on track. We can see this bank is not honoring card of this bank because of these diseases.
00:42:20
Speaker
that look for this kind of company should use a different acquire event was updated. This is something you can only know by processing connection and by looking at failures. And that's when the entire data science or you know, like bit of intelligence helps it because because this happens such a low, you know, set of people that you cannot see a pattern. Right. Okay.
00:42:40
Speaker
And they're doing these small changes, we can improve conversion by 2% or 3%. I mean, not very drastic, but they're still a bit enough for a larger customer. Especially, I think the problem with a lot of G2C, thumb teeth, or smaller branded, every payment is very important for them.
00:42:56
Speaker
Since in the process of growing a brand, you cannot afford to lose even a single customer. One, that is very motivation. Second is you have lost for need of potential customer. You have lost their ability to have a larger marketing around that customer. You can build a great product, unique product, but customers are able to buy, then you're not getting anything out of it. So that's the problem we also understand. So larger companies know all the processes about payment they can optimize. The small companies have less knowledge about payments.
00:43:25
Speaker
And that said, we also do additional job of educating them telling them how to use the payment product so that you can have most of the conversion out of the orders you get it.
00:43:35
Speaker
How do payment gateways compete with each other? Is it on the pricing? Is it on the failure rate? Is it on the sales team which is going out and acquiring? Is it on the value-added services and products? What is the way in which payment gateway companies are competing?
00:43:57
Speaker
See, one is the way payment gateways are being delivered to the customer. See, if you look at six, seven years, all the payment gateways look similar. I just had one product you find out, and then they used to compete on conversion rate, pricing, customer service, which are true today. But if you're starting an internet business, on day one itself, you'd have three to four payment problems which you want to solve before you even go to the market.
00:44:22
Speaker
And if you go to a company which just has one product, then you still have to find more partners to solve other pigments problems.
00:44:29
Speaker
But that is something you can solve by signing up on a payments platform like CashTake. You get a good wordless PG, but you also have four other products which you can use to solve all the problems on the day one. And that's where in the produce market, most of the merchants are going to a company who has a platform approach to solving payments instead of just a single product. And that phenomena is around for the last few. That's why you'll see, right? I mean, wherever you see a payment, most likely they are a payments platform company, not just a PG company.
00:44:54
Speaker
Right. Right. Right. Okay. So that is the more deficient factor. And that's where 90% of the market is out. Right. Only 10%. Right. Two or three players going to have this kind of approach where the market don't have more approach because they could be very linear, they could not innovate on the set. And after this change, then see, see the first first thing I can draw, you know, like analogy with the entire phone market, right? Instead of buying features, one would also want to buy smartphone because you have, you want to do multiple things.
00:45:25
Speaker
That's what people think these days, right? Even if you go out for the shopping, you prefer to go in a mall because you can find a lot of shops, but it's too. So that's where I said like the 90% market, you know, gets out only 10% in a surprise. And then after that, we have the problem about conversion pricing, customer service.
00:45:41
Speaker
And that is something which is dynamic, right? So, QPG could be great in certain segments, right? Because it's very diverse market, right? Things move very different. And payment is like a language, right? Work in North India and work in South India. And also geography, right? When we started working with international companies, I mean, they move much faster than what people can move at. They are extremely low in patience.
00:46:09
Speaker
You just work with someone in, say, Hong Kong or Singapore. This is one thing to be done in the blink of eye. That puts a lot of pressure on you about improving the process, making things more efficient, making things more self-serve. That's how companies start creating abilities about this idea. We as a company are very focused on the internet world. We focus on markets which are discretionary.
00:46:34
Speaker
Right? Because those markets have higher demand, right? Because since if you're buying for a stationary product, your chances of dropping is higher. That's why you have to do a lot of book job as a payments company to convert that customer. But since for a non-distressional thing, it's supposed to make payment for your water or electricity, you'll pay it anyways. There are almost 0 charges for you, according to analysis, you don't want to pay.
00:46:58
Speaker
Actually, we want to be on the internet one, we want to be on the stationary side of the internet one, because that market is larger, that market is more rewarding. That one is also growing very fast. So every time we click, just every time we create the strength, whatever is comfortable with them, whatever is my personal, that's how the market is being expected. Are there still differences in pricing? I would have thought pricing would be like uniform across all BGs. It's very standardized, might be 5 to 10% for various reason, but very standardized.
00:47:29
Speaker
Okay. So what are the numbers you track? Like, do you track like a GMV, which is like amount of payment transacted through you? Or do you track like the margin that you are earning from it? Or, you know, what are the numbers that you keep an eye on and you are like looking at on a daily basis? So it gets different from the product list. So again, the larger for any business, they want to track the bottom line revenue, right?
00:48:00
Speaker
And then they start going up. If I look at a product like payment gateway, where commission is in percentage, except process hundred rupees will make two rupees roughly. Where if I drag GMV, then I can also have some sense of revenue. If my GM is growing, then I can say my revenue is growing.
00:48:17
Speaker
But which is not true with product like say auto-collector payouts, which has a fixed pricing. Because pricing is more dependent on GMV. Even though I can say I'm costing GMV of 10,000 CR. But we can just getting it from say 1000 transaction, my revenue is not high. So those cases will drive number of transactions that we process instead of GMV. So GMV is not a right metric to evaluate any payment companies in today's world.
00:48:44
Speaker
Right, because I can go into like the GMV of this much, but that's not translating to the business revenue, which is important for the company. At times it becomes a vanity number. You have to really look at the product, how the product monetization works, and then you can figure out whether GMV is important. But largely from PG, GMV is important, but for all products, number of transactions in other product, and this is what we track depending on the product. So what GMV do you do for the PG?
00:49:13
Speaker
Are you at liberty to share? Yeah, I think you share it. I mean, on an annual rate, we do upwards of $25 billion to $30 billion. Where does that rank in the industry? Like, are you in the top three, top five? On products that we started, like something like payouts, we own 60% of the market of API payouts, but in that's the number collection.
00:49:38
Speaker
on the side, despite being on the late enters, we already are in the top three that we see right there. So the plates who have a very like in a big tail width, but we are we are able to grow fast, we've been going 100% year over here. And very quickly would be like razor pay and who else like users. But again, because the story is on these companies are larger. But if you look at any starting business today or any start business the last one year, I think majority of the customers cash flow would be a payment partner.
00:50:06
Speaker
Just that they have a larger window, they have a lot of fast movies, they are quite similar volume, but we here in the position acquire all the new market, all the new market is being created, and new market is doubling very fast, right? So if I acquire 50% market, which will be created from now, let's say 2025, then my volume is getting automatically much larger than the older scale. Right, right, right, right. We are moving in that direction. There's not something we can change over, but which time at the end will keep on going up.
00:50:33
Speaker
And we'll have leadership in PG also at some point. Okay. And what is the revenue contribution among these products? Obviously payments today contribute around 80-85%.
00:50:50
Speaker
And we have a bunch of non-payment products in the market. So we haven't discussed about identity product. So this is a non-payment product. So any business wants to verify background of the customer, plan of the customer, GST of the customer. They can use this identity product. OK. Once somebody uploads the document, then there's an API call which sends the document and then the data sent back is verified or not real time.
00:51:19
Speaker
Then we have a bunch of valuable services like instant settlement. I mean, this works with PG, right? But we drive this revenue separately, right? So as far as PG, you get money after one or two days. But with instant settlement, you get money on the same route from the action. Okay.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah, you'd have to pay some extra fees. Exactly. If you want to check me first. And recently we have launched a new set of product called banking as a service. And this is something you have built for platform new banker anyone who wants to give embedded banking to their end customer. But imagine I am a seller like Amazon, and I'm onboarding as you know, seller on the platform.
00:51:56
Speaker
If seller doesn't have a bank account, then Amazon has to ask them to go to this bank, create a bank account and then come to me because with our bank account, they cannot disburse that. But with this kind of feature, Amazon is empowered to create bank account with seller in real time by using cash in the back end.
00:52:10
Speaker
So we have all the APIs, we are integrated with banks in the packet, so they can simply collect data from seller, they can call the HV API, give us the data, and we create a bank account for them instantly. And also moving forward, the seller can use Amazon's portal to send money to anyone, receive money to anyone. Basically, they don't have to go to their bank account to do such work.
00:52:28
Speaker
Right. Even if they need a loan, we can facilitate that whatever they need out of bank, right, we can facilitate it by being a layer. But in all these platforms and the bands. Okay, so this is like a pretty big, big product. And this will be the largest payments in next two to three years.
00:52:48
Speaker
It's an entire Neobank market. Today, if you have to start a Neobank, you have to go and die with a bank. And that gets almost four to six months of your time just doing the back-end plumbing work. And the worst part is you get stuck with one bank. If you want to change your bank department tomorrow, you don't have willpower to do the same work again. So that's when we see a potential creating like a platform, where they assume we work with multiple banks. You as an end user can just tell us what you need.
00:53:15
Speaker
I'll just integrate it here. You don't have to do any manual work here. You focus more on customer acquisition and creating features with delights of customers.
00:53:23
Speaker
Yeah, so you're opening the other account with any one particular bank or with multiple? We have multiple partners and we also give option to these platforms to choose the bank, right? So we can also give option to the bank. Every bank has sub-contrast factor in the market, depending on the job or a fee region. A lot of people can have their own parcel listed, right? If a bank is popular in my family, then I'd want to use that bank and put a safe person and more popular knowledge.
00:53:48
Speaker
And so for the KYC, how does that happen? Like banks need to do KYC before they open an account. So these platforms can collect the KYC from the customer or they can send them to some cash filling where they can upload it. Once we have the KYC forwarded to the bank,
00:54:07
Speaker
And that bank approval is real-time or bank takes some time to approval. It depends on the type of account. So for savings account, there is certain process for proprietor in certain process.
00:54:21
Speaker
But see, there might be some manual for the best part. At the end platform, you don't have to worry about it. The cash flow will take all these. Okay. I want to talk more on neo-banking for a couple of moments. So essentially here, the bank is just the custodian of money. All the other services which banks provide, like a passbook or all of those essentially are now being provided by cash flow in a digital format.
00:54:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we can pull the statement, we can show the entire ledger. But bank is still owns the account, right? They will share the credit card, they will do the what are they going to do? Okay, okay, debit card is from the bank. It's not like a brand new like that form to help in bank distribution services faster in the market. And also, I don't think it's that kind of accidents are more like a layer invisible.
00:55:07
Speaker
Again, I'll go back with the smartphone analogy, which people understand is whenever you install your app on your Apple Android, you can choose the permission that you want to give. In this case, whenever we onboard new platform, we can like control that permissioning thing.
00:55:22
Speaker
a bank doesn't want a platform to say, you know, create a point with a bit card. So they can we can, you know, like control such kind of filter, and we'll never let them create a convert a bit card. So they can just create a call with say, UPI attachment. Okay, okay, okay. So essentially, like, neo banking is now becoming a
00:55:42
Speaker
plug and play option for any startup. Exactly. So they can start. They don't need it. So they can distribute it. There's a need of the market, right? See, even though you have a larger portion of people who are a parent, right? Today, we can say we have 100 crores, you know, like people in the back, but they don't have the right instruments to interact with each other system.
00:56:01
Speaker
I mean, at best, they have a bank account, but they don't have UBI attached to it. They don't have card length to it. They don't have any credit service on it, right? So it's like, they have an account, but they cannot be used again. They're not active banking users.
00:56:14
Speaker
And that's why if you look at number of unique people in the UPI, right, so it has exploded for the last few years, but now it is not going with that split, right, because whichever person could have used UPI, they're on the UPI, right, and UPI have around 40 CR of people, 30 or 40 CR. But if the banking customers are 100 CR, right, so the rest of, you know, 55, 60 CR people are not even being part of the digital ecosystem.
00:56:37
Speaker
Like a company in the dairy space which wants to open accounts for the dairy farmers. Exactly. That aligns with the larger world. We also have the ambition to be like number one payments and banking platform in India. That's why the product we are choosing is aligning with that larger world. We're not in the process of building a lot of end user product, which a lot of companies start doing. But we want to sell a platform more neutral.
00:57:06
Speaker
That's why people can use platform power in a larger scale. What about customer service here? If they have a question about some transaction in the account, normally you can go to your bank. It will be more intimate. I think bank is there to give comfort to the customer.
00:57:26
Speaker
Because it's not easy for customers, because a bunch of issues happen in the last two years, like banks going in a bounce up, and your money gets taxed. So people want to know which bank we are using, and they should have an option to go to the bank all day. And what about credit, like credit card or lending? How is you enabling that? That's part of it. We even do that, right? Once you have the account lender, then we can give customers the choice. We can even work with NVLC partners, right, who want to lend to such kind of customers. Now we have data, we have a lot of profiles, right?
00:57:56
Speaker
We can just enable these processes. Because you have visibility on the bank account at how much money is coming in every month. So based on that visibility of transactions in the account, you can then offer that data to a lender for them to do their underwriting and then offer loans. Yeah, more in a structured way. I mean, we can go and tell them this guy is earning this much money, right? See, we don't have to tell them this is the money in the account. We have to get very structured.
00:58:26
Speaker
If they are comfortable, if they have all the data, they can.
00:58:53
Speaker
But in a lot of cases, bank doesn't have all the context, right? They don't know which company I'm working for. They just know I'm earning this muscle. They don't know which city I'm in. See, I have opened bank on many of them, but I'm working in Bangalore for last three years. And they don't know about it. If they know about it, then they can do a lot of things for me. That's a fine call. Okay, okay.
00:59:13
Speaker
So essentially the reason for banks would be that their investment in technology integration and all is coming down because you are taking care of that for them and helping them to work with not just one Neobank but multiple Neobanks. So the larger advantage for them is distribution. So they can distribute with confidence.
00:59:34
Speaker
They don't have to do a lot of qualification in terms of which part they want to work with. Because we are adding a lot of security features, we are adding filtering features and they can just keep working with us. I want to understand how you built up cash-free as an organization. From three founders to what is the headcount today now? Today we have a little short of 500.
00:59:59
Speaker
So from the three to 500 journey, I would not understand what, how did you navigate it? What kind of decision making mindset did you have in terms of hiring, building up team? How did you structure the company? I wouldn't understand that journey.
01:00:15
Speaker
Right. A lot of learnings have been discovered through us when we started the journey. See, when you start a new company, a new product, and from the day on, you need execution teams. But you need people who can write, people who can set. These are the two execution teams, which still exist even for a larger company. The rest of the teams are supporting teams.
01:00:36
Speaker
Every company will start with these two set of people, people who can build product and people who can sell product or market product. That is how we also started. We were just five people initially. You first used to write code, you first used to do sales, and others too. The idea is to get more executors. We did not start looking for the leaders. We needed deeper, you know, Blackboard and Solvex problem was all bipolar.
01:01:00
Speaker
And that's how we started growing. Then after that, we got a first product person, someone who can think about what to build next, how to build next, and do a bit of operations around product development. And before that, engineers were doing everything, but at times you need more rise, and you need a bit more structure around where the web product has been built. Then things grew, then we got a finance team. We needed someone who can look at the finance, compliance, audit, statutory reporting. Right.
01:01:28
Speaker
Then after all, we also got a designer. It becomes on day one, day two, we guys are finding open source designs, building it. And we had people go to write CSS who can do small, you know, like editing on Photoshop. And also, we were able to do that. But after all these hired designers who can use sigma to be all those tools and make things more standardized. What was the split between the three of you, the founders? So we were two of the founders. So we were two of the founders.
01:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, the founders, and then we had three other guys who joined us very early. Bill, YC, which was 2017 June, we were five people. Other three guys, I mean, two of them were, again, doing coding, and one guy was for sales and distribution. For me, I think I've been writing code, I built the first version of the product, and he was acting around customers, like operations, talking to them.
01:02:26
Speaker
Additionally, both of us were involved in the sales part because we had to do a lot of it. But even more inclined towards sales marketing or customer success, I was put into product development, engineering, and documentation onboarding. Yes, I think, sir.
01:02:48
Speaker
As an entrepreneur, initially, you have to pretty much do everything. You definitely have to pick something which aligns with the core skill, and then you have to be open about everything else. I mean, you don't have to say, I need to find this guy to do it. And that's the way different startup and larger companies come in. So the reason larger companies become slow, because they always try to find the right person, best person for X amount of work, instead of taking the first step.
01:03:14
Speaker
And this is where startups take a lead. So they're going to wait for the perfect individual, perfect time. They just do the job. It might be an average work, but it still helps them make an interpretive system, create a buzz, and get a validation of those ideas. So as companies become bigger, they shouldn't leave behind this in a basic sense of setup if they want to continue growing, continuously improving, continuously completing new startups.
01:03:42
Speaker
No, okay. Yeah. I don't know if you ever heard this saying, or rather something which Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder says that if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you've lost too late. Then it's pretty common. I think even what Chris Fonder also stated, it says. No, that is true. I mean, early days too.
01:04:05
Speaker
Right? That also tells you you have a high standard. See, that is the small difference, right? If you're a great product builder, if you're working a large company, you're already very shielded. It's more about ego shielding. And the founders, normally people start a company or the day zero, they have to really lower their ego, right? If you can't build a shielded ego, then you cannot do it.
01:04:27
Speaker
And that is the type point about being embarrassed, right? People who started very high, it's not easy for them to get embarrassed. And that acts like a, you know, like, you know, entry barrier for them to start this. Yeah, yeah. So what was your hiring philosophy, you know, like, from those three employees you had till 17 to 500 employees today? Like,
01:04:47
Speaker
So initially, we used to handpick people. And initially, it was very important to hire people who also want to learn with you. We have to find the people with the right challenge. So you won't have people who join competitive strategy, and they can also grow with the company. So these two are brand requirements. So normally, what happens is either a startup or runs the employee or runs the startup. If startup is not going fast. In those cases, things stop working in a good way.
01:05:15
Speaker
Suneet someone with good attitude, someone who is very inclined, someone who is very open to learn and willing to grow with the company.
01:05:21
Speaker
So, initial days, you were hiring more for Hangar than for pure skill sets. Skill set was important. I mean, I would not say you used to discount that. But other than the skill set, Hangar was definitely, you know, we had to look. If Hangar was missing, then, you know, then people would just draw a line, like, this is what I'm supposed to do. And for other things, someone else would take care of it. They want to work in a structure, which is not present in the startup, right? I mean, there are no lines with no boundaries.
01:05:49
Speaker
And how would you screen for hunger? The best way is to find people in your network, so that way you'll have experience working with them past year. Then you can both, you know, like mutual connect, like a reference of your own approach. And once we grew beyond a certain point, we onboard a technical reporter who can do sourcing onboarding. And now how do you screen? Like, you know, early days it was hunger that you were screening for. What is it today?
01:06:17
Speaker
Still, through the skill mapping, we try to find people who have worked at a company similar to a skill or higher because we have become more future-looking. So if anyone joins, they should be able to scale five-edged in what we have. So what is your organization DNA, if I could use that term, something which would help a prospective job seeker to understand if cashier is for him or not?
01:06:45
Speaker
Number one is definitely hard and smart working, right? So you're not really going to take up challenges. Second is, you know, a bit of ambition. That is definitely a bit. Third is important integrity, which is, you know, what I think. Fourth would be humility. We want to have a good culture where we don't push people. So humility is important. You should be able to take feedback.
01:07:11
Speaker
I mean, even senior people should encourage questions from the report. Without that, you have to stop growing. So that's where your humility, integrity, and other stuff. So since it's effective, the rapid scale, without that, everything else may not help you give the result. I mean, we can't find out who the other could be. But with our skill set, should not bring result.
01:07:31
Speaker
But next thing, if you are able to bring results, then how can you influence more like larger set of people? See, any company, you will find four kinds of people. This is what I've read very early in my career. You'll have adders, subtractors, multiplier, and dividers. So adders are the ones who improve the company incrementally. So they should be able to do their own job, but they are able to influence very large part, which is okay. Then you have subtractors who are trying hard, but some reason they are unable to finish their own job.
01:07:59
Speaker
Multiplants of the core is scaling the community in their own job, but also influencing in a very bigger range. Say, there is one engineer who is able to train five other engineers and making even product. If there is one salesperson who is getting five ideas and also teaching everyone how to get five more deals on their own. And then there are dividers, which are very dangerous. So dividers may not do so, and there are also, at times, complain a lot and demotivate on the set of people.
01:08:26
Speaker
In all these things, dividers are something you should avoid. Subtractors are one who you can go after, train them, and end up doing that part. Adders are good. I mean, definitely you need to put dividers and multipliers are like you should read it in the best way.
01:08:44
Speaker
Okay, okay. Do you have like some formal processes of managing people like you know, some companies use like OKR as a method of managing performance and you know, so how do you manage performance of 500 people? You have at this stage, you need a little bit of formal process. I mean, you cannot just rely on the feedback. So we do have OKR process that we started recently.
01:09:09
Speaker
The idea is to start OKR at a company level, at a higher level, bring four or five key areas, and define the goals. Then these goals will be sent to all the department heads, and departments will create their own goals, and by looking at this larger goal. At times, one goal of company could have more child goal across the department. Even goal of a department would be in telling you the goal of some different department. Examples say, if a marketing has to do some campaign, then their goal could be to win on a product development team.
01:09:39
Speaker
So once those are created, then it keeps on tricking down and it should hit the last set of people who are executing. So that becomes more like a reference guide. I mean, it's not like people have to stick with that for 100% of the time, but that's a reference guide. And they will know what is most important thing.
01:09:57
Speaker
And they can also measure their contribution. Without OPCAS, measurement contribution becomes unclear. So how did you figure out how to do performance management? Did you employ an HR head who took care of this and recommended the way forward? Or is it based on your own personal research?
01:10:17
Speaker
At this stage, there are a lot of people in all the respective groups. We started recruiting HIV bees like two years back. And today, we have almost like seven to eight people in the HR position. So they also come from the industry, the company that's like a card, red light, hot star. And they've seen these kind of reviews in their own experience.
01:10:36
Speaker
It's just that you have to implement it in our way. Okay, again, it's a very interesting standard of coming up outside. So implementation, execution, and also bringing... With many, someone joined, I clearly say started, right? There's no formal review process. There are very few to explore what they want, but after a while, once you start adding formal process, you also see some kind of friction in implementing it.
01:10:58
Speaker
So you have to take some time in implementing it, like convince people why this is important. And then that's how we have done it. So on the day one, we did not introduce our entire company. We started with senior people till a certain level. And then we went now to other level of feedback. Okay. So I want to understand how you do customer acquisition.
01:11:22
Speaker
Obviously, it would have evolved over a period of time. So tell me about how it used to happen, like that pre-YC period, how it happens today, how much of it is attributable to content marketing, how much is attributable to performance marketing, how much is due to outbound sales. Help me understand that whole customer acquisition piece. Sure.
01:11:46
Speaker
When we started early, our goal was to, again, we knew these are the, these are the set of businesses who are big in online. We have e-farmers, food tech, and smaller SMEs. And initially when we respond, we also were inclined to go to the smaller merchant because we thought acceptance will be had. So it was simply, you know, find websites, find contact of the owner of those companies. I just called them a part of the blue teller about this product. I'd say this is the additional thing I'm doing.
01:12:12
Speaker
And that's how we got the initial set of clients, like 10, 100 clients. And even before that, we used to meet a lot of these people in person. Okay, so essentially, a lot of personal networking and reaching out, that was the early days.
01:12:29
Speaker
through reaching out, we have to do a lot of cold calling, cold email also. People do respond to it or reach out to people over LinkedIn. So that worked, that worked. And then we, once this is working, then we started having sales team in place. So sales team used to create their own pipeline, like they learned to find merchants who could use a product and they'll do the similar thing, like the cold call emailing and everything. And after we
01:12:54
Speaker
gained some traction, then we also started seeing leads coming to our own website. People would go on cash free, sign them up, make true order for marketing, sign them up, create an account, we used to activate that.
API Partnerships and Integration
01:13:06
Speaker
So that's how the journey continued. Then we also set up a partnership team, can go after other software companies who has a payment use kit. So we can just start them and integrate our APIs.
01:13:16
Speaker
and they can sell our APIs to merchants they are signing. For example, say Shopify. Yeah, Shopify is e-commerce, but more, for example, India will be signing an accounting tool. So if you're creating a platform through which anyone can generate an invoice, these companies can integrate cashier APIs, which can embed a payment link in every invoice they generate.
01:13:36
Speaker
Right? So here,
Lead Generation and Management
01:13:37
Speaker
these guys can onboard merchant on cash on behalf of the merchant itself. And that's how we used to get the clients. Today, we have a very long comprehensive process. Then we are very big in terms of inboards. I think every month we get more than, you know, 250,000 leads on the platform. And these are through all the, you know, optimization with SEO, SEM, content, video, PR, right? So all these have been scanned up significantly. So
01:14:06
Speaker
Okay. So do you use some, like what is the CRM you use to manage like 250,000 leads a month is like a very passive amount. Yeah. So we use Salesforce. We use Salesforce. Again, that also has evolved. If you're using some of the tool like VR, then we came to, this is our third tool.
01:14:25
Speaker
But with the ads, the company have been changing scale. We were also being demanding in terms of the feature, in terms of ease of usage. So as of today, we are in Salesforce. I mean, that's what we used to manage. And that is when we tried the status of the customer, right? So on the day when customers signed up status, then they might be on agreement stage, then they could be on active state. And we also measured how many products they're using at cash fee. Okay. Okay.
01:14:54
Speaker
And so for these inbound leads, is it like self-sign up or what is the process? Does every deed receive a call? How does the sales happen? It doesn't have to be. So there are two ways you can sign up on Cashier. One is you go to the onboarding form, you create your account, give us the email, phone number, your address, and upload all the relevant documents that we need for KYC process, your CIGST.
01:15:19
Speaker
Once the lead comes in a pipeline, our business team or onboarding team goes through a business use case. If they find everything in place, they'll just activate the account and you'll get an email on the activation.
Enterprise Client Strategies
01:15:29
Speaker
In other case, if you see you haven't filled out KYC or your business model is not clear to us, then our team will call you back, try to understand business use case from you in person. Once they're convinced, then they'll go back and activate the account.
01:15:43
Speaker
The third step is you can just come and leave a lead, right? If you're not sure what products you need, you can just leave a lead on your phone or email, or sometimes someone will call you back to understand and then you can go and sign up. So these are three methods, you know, to which you can get 100 cash. Okay.
01:16:00
Speaker
So this inbound traffic would essentially be small and mid-size, right? What about enterprise clients? Enterprise clients are mostly outbound. So we have an outbound sales team. And the team is divided
Addressing Industry Challenges
01:16:14
Speaker
into multiple segments. So we have a team going out for e-commerce questions. We have a team for VFSI. We have a team for travel. We have a team for education. We have a team for government. We have a team for utility.
01:16:25
Speaker
But even under these teams, we have sub-signments, right? So, there would be a team looking up to the north region and the south. They create their own pipeline and then define merchants. They use their own listing. So, once they are ready with the roadmap, then this month, I'll have to go and have 30 meetings, 25 meetings.
01:16:44
Speaker
And they try to sell products by understanding the problem. So it's more like a concept that you sell. When you connect with a radiation maker, it could be a head of finance, it could be a good product, it could be the founder itself with companies that are slightly smaller. So we tell them this is what we do and this is how we can help solve your problem. So before even talking to a customer, we do a research to understand what are the solutions applicable to them and then how can we help them by making that out cash-free.
01:17:11
Speaker
So, for example, e-commerce company can make the refund faster, right? So today, for any e-commerce company, 60% of the customer queries are on refund. The customer will come and shout, no, my refund hasn't been credited, or my account got debited, but you never deliver the part, right? It's such a common area. So that is one area we hit a lot. We go and tell them, you know, using Azure, you can make the refund very instant, very fast, and your support query will reduce, the customer will be more delighted, and they'll come back, you know, to your website more and more.
01:17:41
Speaker
But also we sell high 10% because in e-commerce, I like often wonder if your payment drops by five to 10% then you lose revenue in the same proportion, right? So 10% of everything is lost. So there we go and tell them I can help you increase your conversion and that's why your revenue will grow proportionally. So these two are pretty important for e-commerce and this is what we sell.
01:18:03
Speaker
For other days, industry requirements might be different. For an insurance company, the requirement is they have to collect premium for their customers at the time they have to collect in every month or every quarter depending on the plan. And they can also use the regular payments to do that. They don't have to ask the customers to make payment every month. They can just set a mandate or some kind of debit card mandate and they can debit their customers a bond every month.
01:18:28
Speaker
And also when it comes to dispersing that claim, they can again use that payouts API and send money to these guys within second instead of doing the entire manual process. Every industry has a different kind
Company Growth Goals and Strategies
01:18:39
Speaker
of value prop and this is what our sales team get trained on. And when they connect, they share the same solution. Okay, so in your 500 headcount, how many iron sales have been intake? What's the split?
01:18:53
Speaker
So we'll have around 100 dead people in sales. So that, again, encompasses our inbound team, outbound sales team, we can't run in it. And tech and product combined, we should have around 145, 150 people. So these two teams are largest, I mean the largest. Then we have customer success and operations team. So these teams also combined would be 50 to 60 people.
01:19:18
Speaker
Okay, then we have marketing team, we have PR team, we have finance team, we have legal and we have HR and talent technology. And these teams are again having 30-35 people each. Not all of them. I think marketing is PR is not a thing. Right.
01:19:37
Speaker
Okay. So, you know, my last question is to understand what's the roadmap now going forward? Like, you know, what the roadmap in terms of what kind of products, what kind of diversification I wrote back in terms of what kind of fundraise do you have planned? You know, so I would understand that. Right. So the larger vision is how can we be best payments platform in a day?
01:20:01
Speaker
How can cash-free could be one-stop destination through which your business in India can get all of the payments problems sorted? That is the intention.
Infrastructure and Cross-Border Payments
01:20:09
Speaker
And the advantage is that businesses who are starting businesses today are already scaled up. They don't have to worry about finding new vendors to get their problems sorted. We want to be in a position where we can predict the future. We know this problem could become bigger. And you want to start working on the solution even today.
01:20:24
Speaker
We already have taken such steps. One of the assumptions in turning we're making is payments will scale 10x in the next two to three years. For that, we have to keep investing the infrastructure to handle such kind of scale. We already have started a bit of backward integration the way we are processing payments today so that we can be ready with any kind of scale once the market becomes bigger and larger. Similarly, we are also looking at more use cases. What is around cross-border?
01:20:53
Speaker
that we believe in internet economy has to become bigger, then we know in the end, merchants will start exporting to the global customers. And so
Innovations in Offline Payment Solutions
01:21:00
Speaker
that they need a very seamless prosperity and money movement expeditions. So that is one area we've started working on.
01:21:07
Speaker
The third is the offline payment. We still see offline payment is not smooth the way it should be. People still have to struggle with the hardware, which is very expensive and not easy to maintain and not easy to operate. It also has a challenge around upgrading our contractors. We're also coming up with a software solution to help offline merchants to be part of digital payment ecosystem.
01:21:27
Speaker
and try to give the payment experience the way online merchant can give. I mean, it should be as is both. If you see offline payment acceptance hasn't improved in the last 15-20 years, so if pause machines are similar to the way you must have seen in early 2000s. I want to dig a bit into each of these. You said you're doing more backward integration. What does that mean? It means that today, to process a payment, we still rely on technologies which banks provide, which third-party vendors provide.
01:21:56
Speaker
At this stage, we are trying to build those technologies in-house. Instead of going and talking to a third party vendor, we want to have those technologies in our control.
01:22:07
Speaker
What are those technologies? I'd say there is one thing called payment switches. If it's payment switch, you can directly go in front of it. These are massive. But that is something not in the controls. The downside is we don't get full visibility on what is happening with data. If something is not working, something is not working as expected. We don't know the right. It's like a back box
Exploring B2B Trade Solutions
01:22:27
Speaker
for us. And I tried to also limit the scale in terms of number of transactions we can process.
01:22:34
Speaker
Right, because see that the problem, right, a lot of these vendors are not building the product by looking at the market feedback. They're just filling the product, what your banks are asking them to build. That's why the industry is not very uniform. Yeah, okay, okay. So a payment switch is essentially what makes a Visa or a MasterCard network work. They connect with those networks. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
01:22:59
Speaker
So there are a bunch of ideas, but the larger idea is create a single-stop solution through which any payments platform, any payments problem you have, you can find a solution that can share. And you can even, you know, connect to three products and come up with a workflow that works with your business. Okay, okay, okay. And for cross-border, is it like a D2C plan where you're directly going to offer this to customers that do your cross-border payment? Like say, you know, you're wise. So like, are you looking at
01:23:28
Speaker
creating a competitor to wise or are you looking at something which will act as a back end solution or what like? See the target for us would be again the businesses, businesses who are selling outside India or even international businesses
Integrating Local Payment Methods
01:23:42
Speaker
who want to sell to India. So these are two target audience will cater. So all this product would be B2B in nature, if you're running online business and if you need to say accept card from 180 contracts. So that is one solution you can use on cash fee.
01:23:55
Speaker
Second day, say it's a SaaS company and your billing is going into, say, $500,000. Sorry, maybe say $10,000. Say $10,000. Say if you accept a credit card to debit your customer, you have to pay 3% to 4% of TDA. Instead of that, you can use wire transfer. Wire transfer just costs you $30 for the center and also receive.
01:24:16
Speaker
So the plan is how can we add more non-card international payment method so that we can reduce the cost of, you know, that access and entrance, right? And that also increases this competitiveness for this merchant, right? So also if you have to pay 4 to 5% EDR, you'll have to increase the product pricing by 5%. And the more you do that, you'll become less competitive in that local market, right? So payment can help all these businesses, you know, be more competitive in global market by reducing the cost making this efficient and making things faster.
01:24:47
Speaker
So what is this TDS clause? That is the cost to pay. If you look at, say, all the international companies, they charge in the range of 4% to 5%. Even if you tie with the Indian payment gateway, credit card pricing is on the right side. But if you're debating customer for a high ticket side, for $10,000 thing, I mean, 3% would be like $300.
01:25:13
Speaker
Right. So the $300 is significant and it's much more significant for the Indian market, for the Russian market, for the Indian market. And how will you build this cross-border thing? Like, will you go to all the banks in other countries and do one by one tie-ups with them? Or is there like some sort of plug-in playoffs that you can plug into? So we are targeting a few geographies through which we see a lot of export payments come in, primarily US and Europe. And we are seeing how can we integrate local payment method.
01:25:43
Speaker
and provide more payment options to Indian merchants. Today, Indian merchants just have credit card as a payment option to collect from the merchant. Tomorrow, they can have local wallet, they can have ACH, they can have SEPA. So, a lot of these countries have their own internal clearing system, the way we have INPS, UK, and anything like that. Not as fast, but they have something similar, which is again low-cost in nature.
01:26:05
Speaker
Right, so we can create a global pipe of a certified payment collection. Okay, so you would need to create a legal entity in each of these countries and then do an integration. But depends on the category rule. I think you can tie it with a bank by being in India. And that bank
Evolving Trade Payment Market
01:26:24
Speaker
could be in India. So it may not be mandatory, but that becomes the case.
01:26:31
Speaker
Okay, so this would be a competitor to TransferWise or Vice? I mean, the market itself is being created, right? I mean, TransferWise, again, I'm not sure what segment to go after. But for us, it's more of a trade payment, right? So if you look at the retail companies, they are more towards gifting and more around hospitality, right? So trade payment is not something everyone offers today. So intention more towards trade payments, for which in India, we don't have a lot of reliable care.
01:27:01
Speaker
Because the market has been historically smaller, but the market started becoming bigger now. And now, how much it will become bigger in its five years. And it's like a chicken and egg problem. If you're not sold for payment, then businesses will not be encouraged to sell outside India, right?
01:27:16
Speaker
So we have to keep the solution ready first and then businesses are being encouraged to take their innovative products anywhere in that. I guess transfer wise is focused more on spending. Like you can spend in the currency of your vendor, like a US company can spend in rupees using transfer wise, which is like the other approach to what you are looking to build.
Introducing NFC-based Product, Epos
01:27:37
Speaker
Got it. Okay. And for offline payments, like for offline merchants, what is it that you're planning to build?
01:27:42
Speaker
The product is called Epos. So today often merchants need to buy or rent a hardware machine to collect card memory. So that is it right now. Moreover, with a lot of new innovations done by these card schemes, they have come up with a technology called SoftPOS. So they have created a small kernel.
01:28:01
Speaker
And we've printed an app on top of it, right? So the way you can work with a merchant is if you have an Android phone with NFC capability, you can install cash free, you know, like cash free Epos app on your mobile phone. And now your mobile phone can act like a terminal. So if you have a customer walking into your store with that card, you can simply click on cash free app, customer can tap the card on the phone and the payment could be processed.
01:28:23
Speaker
The number of cards which offers that DAP and PAY is very small. If you look at cards issued after 2016, I think all the cards are having net security.
01:28:35
Speaker
Right. And if you look at metro cities, the coverage is high. In absolute number, the market is 20%. But this 20% are the, you know, spenders right at the end of the day. They are the ones who use the ads, you know stores. So the coverage is high. I mean, you can look at your friends at the right and the old friends who go to the store and buy on the website. But there that should be energy enabled.
01:28:56
Speaker
Also, the coverage is significant. And now you also have apps like Samsung Pay, Google Pay through which you can tokenize your cards. So even though your plastic card doesn't have any NFC capability, but if your card is in Samsung Pay, you can again use Samsung Pay mobile and tap a door, you know, like cash fee, e-pause app, and payment could be processed. Okay. How does this happen? This tokenizing of card, like it stores the data and then
01:29:20
Speaker
It stores you, and then they can emit the card data through NFC channel, right? So, similarly, even your card has the NFC chip, they can share the data with the NFC receiver. A similar thing happens if you have card in a Samsung Pay wallet or Google tablet. Oh, got it, got it, got it. Okay, okay. Which I think, in the US, this is like the prominent method, right? Like, of digital payments, like the phone transfer. It's like a tokenized card on the phone. It's sample-based. This is significant.
01:29:48
Speaker
I think UVI has taken that lead, but it's still coming. Card payment is significant. The volume is high. If you look at RBI data, I think in terms of volume, card is still largest in India. And I think for this tap and pay, there's like a transaction limit, not like 2000 rupees, or it used to be something like that. I think it's 5000 rupees that you don't have to enter your PIN.
01:30:12
Speaker
Beyond 5,000, you have to enter the PIN. For that, we have a solution today, right? We have very small hardware. For higher ticket side, you keep your card in hardware, and PIN could be entered on the mobile phone itself. And so that's the workaround. But most of the smaller retail use cases is as big as 5,000 unless you go to a grocery store like Spencer or Star, or you go and buy electronics.
Solutions for Mobile Agents
01:30:36
Speaker
So we have full coverage. It's just that for less than 5,000, it's more convenient. And beyond 5,000, you have to enter the PIN.
01:30:43
Speaker
So for this merchant business, what is the plan? Because if you were actually to acquire small merchants, that would be very costly in terms of the acquisition costs. So do you want to go after that market or do you want to stick to organized retail, like Spencer? Correct. So the intent is to start with chains organized retail. And even if we're not trying to compete with this, like Pause for Hindarich,
01:31:12
Speaker
So we have been finding use cases where it's very hard to operate post-machine. It is basically your home delivery use cases. The long delivery use case is you cannot carry a machine. These days, you can't purchase coming at home. Even a lab testing is happening at home. Even a lot of selling of insurance, education services are happening at home.
01:31:31
Speaker
So all these agents, wherever there's a moving agent problem, the solution is much better than the heart. And easy to carry and easy to scale. If you have say 10,000 agents selling insurance, you cannot give faster than 10,000 people. That's not right. But you can give this app which could be stored on each of their mobile and they can accept that when they're inside house of another customer.
01:31:54
Speaker
If
Podcasting Journey and Recommendations
01:31:55
Speaker
you like the Foundathesums podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like marketing, technology, career advice, books, and drama. Visit the podium.in, that is, T-H-E-V-O-D-I-U-N.IN for a complete list of power shows.
01:32:18
Speaker
Before we end the episode, I want to share a bit about my journey as a podcaster. I started podcasting in 2020 and in the last two years, I've had the opportunity to interview more than 250 founders who are shaping India's future across sectors.
01:32:34
Speaker
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01:32:55
Speaker
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