Next emerging trend in fintech sector is Neobanking: Easebuzz CTO

New Delhi, June 7 : Software-enabled payments collection and payouts platform Easebuzz aims to speed up payment collection and reduce credit periods with a smooth end-user experience, Amit Kumar, CTO, said on Tuesday.

According to Kumar, the company helps small businesses to digitise payments without worrying about setting up new tech systems and business processes.

It serves more than 60,000 businesses across Tier 1 to Tier 3 cities including startups, SMEs and entrepreneurs.IANS spoke to Kumar and below are the selected excerpts of the interview:Q.How is Easebuzz helping entrepreneurs, retailers, MSMEs and SMEs shift to digital payment collections and what are the value-added services that Easebuzz has to offer?A.Easebuzz is a software-enabled payments collection and payouts platform, which helps small businesses to digitize payments without worrying about setting up new tech systems and business processes.

We serve more than 60,000 businesses across Tier 1 to Tier 3 cities including startups, SMEs and entrepreneurs.Early-stage growth companies face complex business scenarios as they grow and trying to solve these scenarios, they end up with high-cost centres with banks or other financial institutions.Easebuzz is a solution for such companies.

Easebuzz helps businesses with smart APIs and cost-effective solutions in one place.It aims to solve one of the biggest problems: to speed up payment collection and reduce credit periods with a smooth end-user experience.It also solves complex business problems involving payments like Split Payments, Auto Recurring Payments (eNACH/paper-eManadate/UPI2.0), Auto refund on split transactions, Sub aggregator Model, Bridgebuzz for Marketplace, etc.Listed below are VAS solutions for businesses: EasyCollect: EasyCollect makes it simple for businesses to create and share payment links on the go and automate payment reminders and reconciliation.Businesses can use EasyCollect to automate reminders that will help them improve the number of paid invoices and send links to minimize the cost, time and manual labour necessary to collect payments.

SmartBilling: It offers an invoicing solution with recurring payment capabilities to collect payments from clients and fixed rentals, especially within the subscription model.It streamlines and automates financial and administrative tasks with a host of features that include the likes of split payments, QR code enabled payments, comprehensive report generation, downloadable PDF invoices, and GST compliant invoices.

This subscription billing API helps businesses access all the information through a smart dashboard that is powered by centralized data management software.FeesBuzz: FeesBuzz, as the name goes is a full-stack payment collection solution for educational institutes.Teller: An easy-to-use yet powerful solution for tracking timely settlements, sorting out expenses, and managing invoices; Teller is another product launched by Easebuzz that helps to adapt to changing e-invoicing trends.Teller offers an invoice payment solution that gives businesses an easy way to share all the invoices on time and reconcile the transactions through a single dashboard.

A perfect B2B invoicing partner for small to medium businesses, Teller is a comprehensive API solution to easily generate e-invoices in a few simple steps with 100 per cent security and end-to-end assistance.Forms: Forms is a tool that helps businesses build and customize forms in seconds and gets it enabled with a payment solution with 100+ payment options.Enabled with built-in analytics, Forms will drive data over UTM links which allow businesses to measure source-wise outcomes on their digital marketing campaigns.No coding knowledge is required! Q.Tell us more about the launch of your own ePOS app and how it will play a pivotal role in strengthening the Indian retail and digital business ecosystem?A.ePOS solution is for the offline retail segment in India, with the core offering of UPI QR, Payment Links (which can be shared with customers via SMS, WhatsApp, and email to get instant payments) and Invoice generation, ePOS makes it easier for merchants to accept payments and manage transactions and settlements digitally.

Now available on Google Play Store, merchants can download the ePOS App and enjoy seamless sign-up, do instant KYC, and get onboarded to start receiving digital payments at their retail stores and home deliveries.EasebuzzePOS software helps merchants to increase sales by easily accepting payments digitally via multiple payment modes offering customers Convenience and Safety.

Everything is stored automatically and electronically, and customers can generate custom reports to analyze their sales patterns as well.Q.What are some of the emerging technologies that you are most excited about over the medium term in your industry? A.With emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Cloud Computing, AI and ML Fintech has emerged from payments, infrastructure, and access to financial services to distribution.With benefits like data management opportunities, automated analysis systems, reduced operational cost, business continuity, customer service, and scalability -- fintechs are utilizing cloud computing to accelerate the process of innovation and change the financial ecosystem.

Cloud computing lets businesses reduce the cost of buying, aligning the system, maintenance, and upgrading the infrastructure for servers.Similarly, Blockchain technology has the potential to upend entire industries, especially the financial sector.

It can be gradually integrated with standard accounting operations, starting with data protection and progressing to fully traceable audit trails.The way double-entry bookkeeping has transformed the world of financial accounting, allowing managers to know whether their own books can be trusted, businesses can write transactions directly into a joint register, creating an interlocking system of enduring accounting records, rather than keeping separate records based on transaction receipts.

The next emerging trend in the fintech sector is Neobanking.These banks are customer-centric and unlike the traditional banks have completely different banking model altogether.

Artificial intelligence coupled with data analytics drives the decision-making process of any Neo-bank.Right from customer experiences to traditional banking services such as money transfers, utility payments, and personal finance, Neo-banks are here to offer a wide range of offerings to customers and continue to be the talk of the town.Q.You are born in the cloud organization.How has cloud technology helped you to scale your business?A.AWS cloud is simple to use, and allows to quickly and easily gain access to world-class infrastructure that provides the highest level of security and availability.

Our productivity and efficiency were increased by the managed cloud infrastructure.It ensures that data is always available with minimal maintenance and resource requirements.

AWS is more flexible than other platforms because you can choose the operating system, programming languages, database and other services that you need.A virtual environment was also provided that allowed us to load and configure the services and software that our application needs.

This allows for easier migration of existing applications and preserves options for creating new solutions.One of the most important factors in determining success or failure in todays highly competitive fintech market is scaling.

There are many new technologies at our disposal, which are easier to use but are not as scalable as AWS.We as businesses feel more confident now than ever about how important it is to have a flexible infrastructure after the chaos caused by the pandemic.Your enterprise can respond quickly to external changes when it can scale easily -- up, down, out or inside.

Cloud can help with horizontal and vertical scaling.Here are a few examples.1) We have created a data lake to solve our data storage problems and are processing real-time data using spark streaming and Apache Hudi.2) We are using Amazon Sagemaker to implement our fraud risk models.This acts as a core service that is used by one of our fraud detection products.3) We are also breaking and moving large amounts of data processing from our apps end to the backend using services such as Amazon Glue, and Step function.4) API gateway and Amazon Fargate are two of the cloud tech we are considering for scaling our app architecture.Further, fintechs like us always depends on the risk coverage where AWS infrastructure support for PCI-DSS environment, data localization compliance, availability ensured,and threat detection covers almost everything.

Some specialized services like Well-Architected review, security review, FTR, etc.help us to identify any gaps and fix them immediately.Compliance and Government regulation were achieved at a much faster rate due to the out of the box solutions provided.

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