JOIN US Zeta, a portfolio company of the Directi Group, has marked its entry into India’s Rs 4,000-crore meal voucher market with its digital meal vouchers app.
“In any organisation, receiving/granting approvals for expenses is a nightmarish process for all the parties involved, including the HR, management and employees. We wanted to solve this problem, and we have started off with meal vouchers,” said Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and Co-founder, Zeta and Directi Group.
With Zeta, the meal voucher booklet is uploaded onto the app, and is available for use in the digital format. While its distribution itself is a time consuming process, payments made by the physical meal voucher take about 15-30 days to clear. As an app on the smartphone, the digital meal voucher alleviates these pain points by processing the payments instantly.
“In a country that has a market of about 8-10 million users for meal vouchers, only a million people actually use it. However, now, everyone uses smartphones and we want to leverage that,” he said.
The digital meal voucher can be redeemed across the company’s 3,000 affiliated merchants, and also non-affiliated merchants.
Non-affiliated merchants
“When shopping with non-affiliated merchants, the user can upload the bill for a reimbursement. This is the first time an arrangement like this has been introduced,” he said.
Targetting a user base of two million by this year-end, Turakhia says, “In our own company, with the introduction of digital meal vouchers in October, out of 1,000 employees, the user base has increased from 200 to 400,” he said.
The company is set to embark on an aggressive sales and marketing journey from January to April. “In the next three months, Zeta is set to have more affiliated merchants than Sodexo and Ticket Restaurant combined,” he said.