Table of Contents
As businesses grow in size and numbers, they need solutions that can help them with daily bulk transactions. As much as they need ease of receiving payments, they want the same when making payments.
However, inefficiencies in banking transactions often restrict them and they encounter a host of disbursement issues. This is where Cashfree Payments allows businesses to disburse transactions at scale to multiple stakeholders in real time.
With Payouts, business merchants can make vendor payments, customer refunds, partner commissions, employee salaries and other incentives, contest winnings and much more.
Merchants have to make these bulk payments quite frequently. Therefore, they want to send timely payments to their partners or workers. Otherwise, the business growth is interrupted.
The vendors as well as the part-time workers may be hesitant to work with merchants who delay their payments.
When we talk of commissions and incentives, multiple businesses employ several contractual and short-term workers as well as freelancers. In fact, several businesses run on these gig economy players.
Well, what is the Gig Economy? How Payouts can be useful for the gig economy? Let’s understand in detail!
What is the Gig Economy – Gig Economy Meaning
The Gig Economy is a section of the labour market consisting of short-term contracts or freelance work in contrast to permanent jobs.
Gig economy workers have low to no job security since they are not permanent employees. However, they have more flexibility and independence as they are not bound by corporate business timings and norms.
Here are a few examples of gig workers:
- Uber, Ola, Rapido and other such commuter businesses have several drivers who work temporarily. They can choose to accept a ride or not and merchants pay them accordingly
- Swiggy or Zomato like online food order platforms that have delivery guys and valets
- Urban Clap provides multiple services ranging from in-house salon services to plumbing or pest control. They have several such freelance make-up artists and contractual workers
- Social media influencers who partner with brands and businesses for promotional gigs and posts. Many businesses do sponsor posts for improving their social media presence and brand awareness
The above-mentioned examples are just a few instances of gig economy players but are not restricted to this.
According to Niti Aayog’s study on ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’, about 77 Lahks (7.7 million) workers were engaged in the gig economy in FY 2020-21. It is expected to expand to 2.35 crore by 2029-30.
The gig economy is taking over conventional employment modes as the younger generation can adapt easily. It is helping businesses in maintaining a smaller workforce and pay per assignment/project/task rather than a full-time salary. Therefore, it helps businesses in cost control.
Moreover, it also provides increased choices to employers or business merchants who can hire contractual workers with specialised skills.
Challenges in Payouts for the Gig Economy Workers
Businesses face manifold challenges when they make payments via online banking modes. There are low transaction rates and also dependency on banking hours. To add to it, the integration and reconciliation of payments is not a smooth process.
When it comes to workers in the gig economy, they often get delayed payments. Freelancers, contractual workers and part-time employees, more than often DO NOT get their settlements, incentives or payouts within the stipulated time.
How many times has a delivery guy or a cab driver asked a customer to pay in cash?
It is probably because business merchants delay their vendor payments. So, they want to take cash and are often hesitant to accept digital payments.
Likewise, suppose an influencer does a sponsored post but does not get payments on time. Then, s/he may not partner again with a brand or a business or spread a negative review.
Undoubtedly, such resistance (as a result of delayed payments to gig economy workers) has an impact on the business!
Wondering how?
Suppose your business provides cab service and drivers do not want to accept rides that have digital payments. Imagine the loss that your business may suffer!
You will be losing out on so many potential customers if the drivers accept only cash payment rides whereas many customers choose to pay digitally.
PORTER, an app-based mini truck and bike booking service, encountered a similar problem. Their payouts for the part-time drivers and other such gig economy players used to get delayed.
However, once Porter started using Cashfree Payments, they were able to make payouts for gig economy workers instantly.
How Payouts by Cashfree Payments Helped Porter?
Porter has to make frequent payments to multiple drivers and delivery agents. They used to do weekly payments to their drivers!
They used to upload detailed payment excel sheets to a bank portal. It contained partner drivers’ account details and the amount they had to disburse to each driver. It would take about 10-11 days for the driver to receive the payment.
Therefore, the drivers became reluctant to accept orders with online payments but wanted orders with cash payments.
But, ever since Porter integrated with Cashfree Payments, they can do instantaneous payouts to the drivers at the end of a trip itself.
All Porter’s drivers are equipped with their app wherein they add money to their respective digital wallets. They can either transfer the amount from their wallet to their bank accounts or use it for other rewards or spend it.
So, now, irrespective of cash or online payments, drivers show higher acceptance of the orders. This has helped the business to grow.
How did they Benefit from Payouts?
Here’s how:
- We helped them make transactions at scale and with a high success rate. This underlines the positive impact of Cashfree Payments’s highly effective solutions
- Porter also uses our Verification Suite, to verify the bank account details of the delivery partner during onboarding. This has led to faster KYC, ensuring payouts to the right beneficiary bank account
- It has also positively impacted the productivity of delivery partners as they receive their payouts instantaneously. Porter witnessed a change in drivers’ behaviour. More driver partners started going for online orders.
Cashfree Payments’s partnership with businesses like Porter illustrates the significance of Payouts for the gig economy, as a modern bulk disbursal solution.
Read the PORTER CASE STUDY in detail!
We would like to share that ‘Payouts’ by Cashfree Payments has the industry’s best transaction rate at more than 98%. This is why we lead Payouts in India with a 50% market share.
We have 100% digital onboarding and paperless KYC where merchants can do their first transaction immediately after getting onboarded. We also introduced various fund sources like a connected bank account, Cashfree Wallet, Paytm and corporate credit cards. These are the various fund sources for better routing of the transactions.
Our Payouts support almost all types of payment modes including UPI, wallets, and card transfers alongside IMPS, NEFT and RTGS.
Streamlining Payouts with Cashfree Payments
‘Payouts’ has a highly-automated process with API support giving business merchants complete control of their payout needs. It also works on all browsers and operating systems as well as supports bulk transfers from India to another country. It is easy to handle transactions, view failures, and make payment reversals.
With Payouts, businesses can flourish not only because they can make timely refunds to customers BUT ALSO timely payments to their vendors and contractual workers. Gig Economy is burgeoning where businesses need to make regular and timely payments, often in bulk.
A lot of freelancers and temporary workers struggle with delayed and untimely payments for a service or a job already done.
It is quite natural that they would not want to associate themselves with the merchant who can’t pay them on time. Therefore, this could negatively impact the business’s growth.
However, integrating with Cashfree Payments can help you deal with this issue where you can keep your customers, partners and gig workers satisfied. With Payouts for the gig economy, you can add efficiency and timeliness to the process and operations.
So, if you want to enjoy all these features and make instant payouts 24×7 even after banking hours, reach out to us.
