Leading payments company, Innoviti Payment Solutions today announced financing of Rs 120 Crores (~ USD 18 million) to further its vision of digitally organizing the flow of money for businesses across the retail supply chain. The current round was led by the SBI-FMO Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investor Catamaran. Masterkey Holdings, Bangalore were the exclusive investment bankers to the deal.
Less than 10% of India’s retail payments are currently digital, creating a market opportunity of more than $500 Bn annually. Similarly, the shortfall in supply of funds to SMEs is estimated in excess of $300 Bn and is difficult to solve in the absence of technology-based solutions. Further the Indian market requires a differentiated approach to product design given the communication infrastructure challenges and low levels of awareness about digital technologies. Innoviti has focused on an experience-centric approach to solving these problems through its uniPAY Next and smelending.com platforms. Deep technology has been used to build solutions that work within existing infrastructure constraints to deliver payment processing reliability of more than 96% vs. the industry average at ~80%. Enhanced reliability builds confidence in digital payments with both the consumer and the merchant. Transaction processing time has been brought down to an average of ~2 seconds (vs. industry averages at 7 seconds), thus delivering a superior experience to the customer.
Over the past twelve months Innoviti has also been extending the platform to provide lending solutions for small businesses. Branded as smelending.com, this platform extension provides a frictionless process for addressing the short-term working capital requirements of small businesses. Using technology to automate all aspects of the lending process, the platform enables loans as small as Rs. 30,000 (US$500) for periods as short as 15 days. Designed as an asset light platform, smelending.com connects lenders to small businesses and processes more than 150,000 loans annually for over 30,000 such small businesses.
On the payment processing side, Innoviti has several recent firsts to its credit. These includes a) the launch of faster contactless card acceptance for the first time in multiplexes, b) launch of UPI acceptance in offline retail through its UPI@POS solution in collaboration with NPCI, and c) launch of automated acquirer fallback feature to provide greater payment processing reliability to merchants struggling with store and bank network failures.
The current round of funding will be used to a) aggressively market the uniPAY Next experience to acquire customers looking for greater speed and reliability in their payment acceptance, b) rapid expansion of smelending.com platform to provide working capital loans to kirana stores and brand franchisees and c) expand the product to address payment and lending issues beyond just retail to more businesses across the supply chain.
Innoviti’s payment platforms serve a marquee client base of merchants including Reliance Retail, Titan, Landmark Group, INOX, Indigo, Walmart and several others. Leading banks such as HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI, Standard Chartered, Kotak and Citibank use the platform to access customers for processing their payments and distributing to them loans.
“A rapidly growing Indian economy with fledgling infrastructure needs a different approach to delivery of payment solutions. An approach that first focusses on making every transaction happen, and happen fast. Innoviti with its extensive experience and relationships in the payments space has embarked on the journey of delivering to this simple promise of speed and reliability in payments. The current funding from marquee investors is a huge endorsement of our approach and business plan. We believe that our platform is a game changer and are eager to utilize this round of funding to rapidly scale our presence," said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.
Image: Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti
Less than 10% of India’s retail payments are currently digital, creating a market opportunity of more than $500 Bn annually. Similarly, the shortfall in supply of funds to SMEs is estimated in excess of $300 Bn and is difficult to solve in the absence of technology-based solutions. Further the Indian market requires a differentiated approach to product design given the communication infrastructure challenges and low levels of awareness about digital technologies. Innoviti has focused on an experience-centric approach to solving these problems through its uniPAY Next and smelending.com platforms. Deep technology has been used to build solutions that work within existing infrastructure constraints to deliver payment processing reliability of more than 96% vs. the industry average at ~80%. Enhanced reliability builds confidence in digital payments with both the consumer and the merchant. Transaction processing time has been brought down to an average of ~2 seconds (vs. industry averages at 7 seconds), thus delivering a superior experience to the customer.
Over the past twelve months Innoviti has also been extending the platform to provide lending solutions for small businesses. Branded as smelending.com, this platform extension provides a frictionless process for addressing the short-term working capital requirements of small businesses. Using technology to automate all aspects of the lending process, the platform enables loans as small as Rs. 30,000 (US$500) for periods as short as 15 days. Designed as an asset light platform, smelending.com connects lenders to small businesses and processes more than 150,000 loans annually for over 30,000 such small businesses.
On the payment processing side, Innoviti has several recent firsts to its credit. These includes a) the launch of faster contactless card acceptance for the first time in multiplexes, b) launch of UPI acceptance in offline retail through its UPI@POS solution in collaboration with NPCI, and c) launch of automated acquirer fallback feature to provide greater payment processing reliability to merchants struggling with store and bank network failures.
The current round of funding will be used to a) aggressively market the uniPAY Next experience to acquire customers looking for greater speed and reliability in their payment acceptance, b) rapid expansion of smelending.com platform to provide working capital loans to kirana stores and brand franchisees and c) expand the product to address payment and lending issues beyond just retail to more businesses across the supply chain.
Innoviti’s payment platforms serve a marquee client base of merchants including Reliance Retail, Titan, Landmark Group, INOX, Indigo, Walmart and several others. Leading banks such as HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI, Standard Chartered, Kotak and Citibank use the platform to access customers for processing their payments and distributing to them loans.
“A rapidly growing Indian economy with fledgling infrastructure needs a different approach to delivery of payment solutions. An approach that first focusses on making every transaction happen, and happen fast. Innoviti with its extensive experience and relationships in the payments space has embarked on the journey of delivering to this simple promise of speed and reliability in payments. The current funding from marquee investors is a huge endorsement of our approach and business plan. We believe that our platform is a game changer and are eager to utilize this round of funding to rapidly scale our presence," said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.
Image: Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti
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