A digital push to payments

Fintech major Razorpay is looking at corporate credit cards for small and medium industries and its neo-banking platform, Razorpay X to drive growth in the next few quarters, a top company official told DH.

Speaking on the sidelines of FTX, the company’s fintech conference in Bengaluru, Harshil Mathur, co-founder of the company said, “Currently, the payments business forms 70% of our revenue and Razorpay X along with Razorpay Capital forms the rest. We have launched the corporate credit cards in partnership with RBL.”

The company is also launching a current account service, to aid small businesses and startups. Mathur says, “Though personal banking has changed over the years, business banking involves manual processes, and often faces issues such as lack of communication among different entities. Our service will take care of all aspects, from transactions to payrolls and so on. It can all be managed on a single dashboard in a mobile app,” he said.

At the event, Razorpay had announced that it will be launching payment support for freelancers, consultants, and other unregistered businesses like tutors, gym instructors, and others.

The company has also acquired payroll and HR management software company, Opfin.

Payment support for freelancers will solve issues related to trouble collecting advance payments, creating GST compliant invoices, and lack enterprise-grade tools to manage bills and finances and needing constant payment follow-ups. “With features like payment support for over 100 currencies, freelancers and individual businesses can access a larger pool of consumers across the world,” the company said. 

An IIT-Roorkee graduate, Mathur launched Razorpay in 2014 with Shashank Kumar.

Starting out as a payments service, it now offers full-stack converged payments solutions. When the company started out, the founders wanted to leverage technological strength to work with banks and financial institutions, marry them together and provide a single platform for all types of businesses. 

Harshil says, “We knew we wanted to handle money flow and started with payments, enable tech companies and startups to accept payments seamlessly how this started four years back. We built a lot of interesting things and scaled rapidly. In the last year, we have scaled from one and a half lakh merchants to six lakh on the platform. We want to create tech solutions for all financial issues businesses tend to face.” 

When they started out, banks were wary about the digital payments space and were not very convinced about people from non-financial backgrounds building a fin-tech platform. “We see the sector as a product and tech issue than a financial one,” quips Harshil.

The company has focussed on innovation in tech to move ahead in the intensely competitive Indian market. They were among the first to board the digital onboarding process for businesses, claims to be the first to support UPI as a payment gateway and so on.

Harshil points out, “We have always wanted to be the financial cloud for small businesses and startups. We have focussed on solving the financial needs of business and continue to focus on the B2B market as of now.”

Fintech as a sector often faces many regulations. According to Harshil, some regulation is the need of the hour.

“We feel that regulations help us innovate more, and offers more opportunities to create more products and innovative services.”

Innovation is vital, says Harshil since it offers the value add that merchants and customers seek.

“Though interest in digital payments has seen an uptick, it is important to offer value additions to customers. A lot of our work depends on creating these additions to our products.”

Harshil states that the UPI and IMPS push by the government has helped the fintech industry a great deal.

“It is a great initiative and has not been done anywhere in the world. Even in advanced economies like the United States, digital payments have not been made this easy.”

On the road ahead

Currently, Razorpay works with more than 6 lakh businesses such as Indigo, BSE, Thomas Cook, Reliance, SpiceJet, Aditya Birla, Sony, and OYO. They plan to scale up to nearly 1.5 million by the coming year.