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The end of yet another eventful year is upon us. A year that brought us many milestones, achievements to celebrate, and occasions to remember fondly.
We started returning to our offices, grew to a family of 842, turned 7 years old, opened 3 new offices across the country, and launched products that put us on the forefront of fintech innovation.
We also became the Payments Partner for the debut season of Shark Tank India – which went on to become one of the country’s most loved shows. Further along, we became the Payments Partner of Global Fintech Fest 2022 – the world’s largest fintech summit – and Bengaluru Tech Summit 2022, Asia’s largest tech event.
Amid celebrating these highs and working on pathbreaking products, there’s much that we want to share with you.
So, let’s rewind.
The year in numbers
We pulled all stops this year, in a bid to bring fintech excellence to Indian businesses. The culmination of our efforts can be summed up in three neat figures.
This past year, we processed USD 40 billion in transactions. We are currently serving 200+ million bank accounts, and powering payments for over 3,00,000 merchants.
Revolutionising payments, one product at a time
Finding simple, revolutionary solutions to long-standing, complex payment problems has been our goal since we started out seven years ago. And, this year, we went above and beyond to bring this vision to life.
Here’s a ready reckoner on launches this year, from the House of Cashfree Payments.
Collections
softPOS
Collecting payments from customers, especially those who prefer COD orders, can be challenging. We decided to dive deep into the problem and build layers on top of our existing products, so your collection woes can become a thing of the past.
With softPOS, we enabled business merchants and their agents to turn any android device into a POS machine.
All your agents or delivery partners have to do is download the softPOS Android app and connect your Cashfree Payments account, and they’re ready to collect payments from your customers at their doorstep via
- Payment links with options for payment via UPI, cards, net banking, Pay later, paypal, etc.
- Dynamic codes for each payment
- Tap & Pay (using mobile NFCs)
Your agents can also record cash payments, helping you reconcile smoothly.
We further introduced Static QR Codes on softPOS machines to facilitate secure contactless in-store payments. Delivery partners and sales agents can generate static QR codes for customers to scan and pay.
This helps you collect and keep track of payments, especially if you operate through multiple physical stores, or have many points of collection.
On-demand UPI Autopay
We took our UPI AutoPay offering up a notch with On-demand UPI Autopay. This adds a personalised layer which enables businesses like you to customise your services as per your unique customer requirements.
With On-Demand UPI payment, customers can make recurring payments for subscription plans instead of making one-off payments repeatedly. Your subscribers set up auto-debit with a one-time authorisation, deciding the amount, frequency and duration.
This goes a long way in offering your customers payment flexibility. What’s more -it is super easy to implement, and is supported on all major UPI apps such as Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, and the like.
BNPL by Cashfree Payments – India’s largest BNPL suite
Providing convenience and flexibility to the end customers of the businesses we’re so proud to power got us to build our latest offering – BNPL by Cashfree Payments.
With India’s largest BNPL suite, we enable businesses to offer pay later options, credit and debit card EMIs as well as cardless EMIs via our 30+ partners.
Our BNPL offering can boost conversions by 30%, yield a 68% higher average order value and above all, bring your customers the ultimate flexibility of payment via no-cost EMIs and more.
3-D Secure 2.0 for international card payments
When a consumer makes a purchase online digitally, verifying transaction details and customer identity, and preventing fraud are absolutely vital.
We recently launched 3DS 2.0 – a secure and efficient method to collect payments from international customers for Indian businesses. It allows transactions to flow at great speed, while our APIs help banks and merchants distinguish clean transactions from fraudulent ones.
QR and intent flow for UPI Autopay
To make recurring payments and subscriptions simpler for businesses, we launched QR codes and intent flow for UPI Autopay. Together, they make setting up autopay much faster for customers while embellishing the overall user experience.
Offer Engine
When you are looking to convert more customers, reduce drop-offs and boost seasonal sales, discounts go a long way. But, implementing discounts is where most businesses encounter roadblocks.
This year, we built the Offer Engine – a simple, yet powerful mechanism that makes it easy for businesses like you to create, configure, and manage offers across all online payment modes directly from the Cashfree Payment Gateway dashboard.
Disbursals/Payouts
Integrated Payouts
Whether it be paying employees or vendors, sending out partner commissions or customer refunds, making bulk payouts is a routine activity for businesses. What puts a dent in this activity is having to integrate with multiple banks (and going through tons of paperwork). Bank holidays and transaction-per-second limits just add to the already long list of woes.
Our Integrated Payouts with 100% online onboarding, paperless KYC and a dedicated account manager, is a step in making this activity delightful. What’s more – we connect you with all of our partner banks with our one-time integration – cutting down the integration time to three weeks, as opposed to several months if done with banks one by one.
Our payouts are instant, and run round the clock, even on bank holidays. And, with dynamic rerouting for payouts through multiple banks, success rates remain high.
Besides, we’ve also made manual errors a thing of the past, with bulk uploads for disbursals and smart reconciliation.
Refunds on Cashgram
While refunds on UPI and cards are getting faster, COD refunds remain quite the challenge for businesses because they take ages to come through. Cashgram is our moonshot at making COD refunds simpler than ever before.
With Cashgram, our most sought-after payout tool, you can process refunds to your customers for all COD orders. With just a phone number or an email ID, you can share a Cashgram with your customer and process refunds swiftly. It is smooth, it is easy and, above all, it does not take the usual 10-15 days.
Payouts via Corporate Credit Cards and Escrow Accounts
Businesses looking for multiple fund sources for making payouts – we hear you.
You can now make payouts via connected bank accounts, corporate credit cards and escrow accounts on our platform.
You can add and manage multiple corporate credit cards to your Cashfree Payments dashboard, and use them to make payouts flexibly. You can also see your corporate credit card fund source details, available balance in the fund source, and the latest recharge details on the Overview screen.
You can also create escrow accounts and use our powerful APIs for loan disbursements, repayments and co-lending – staying secure and compliant as you operate.
Digital Lending Compliant Solution for NBFCs and BNPL
We also launched a full-stack digital lending solution for NBFCs and fintechs. Our tailored solution enables them and their partner LSPs to scale their digital lending use cases, in alignment with RBI’s latest Digital Lending Guidelines.
With our suite, businesses can create escrow accounts and operate through APIs for loan disbursements, repayments and co-lending, while being fully compliant.
Verification Suite
This year, we built the Verification Suite – a fuss-free solution that facilitates KYC for customers, employees and vendors by verifying their PAN, Aadhar, bank account numbers, and GSTINs.
Bank Account Verification
Onboarding vendors or employees, and need to know if their bank account details are in order?
Verify up to 10,000 bank accounts and IFSCs in real time via dashboard bulk upload or API with our Bank Account Verification functionality. You could do the verification manually, or upload details to verify in bulk. You can also do bulk verification by enabling maker and checker flow.
Permanent Account Number (PAN) Verification
With this addition to our verification suite, you can verify up to 10,000 PANs instantly. You can verify the beneficiary’s PAN details like the card holder’s name and PAN type while onboarding employees, vendors or customers.
Aadhar Verification
Likewise, with Aadhar Verification, you can instantly verify the Aadhaar, along with all details like age, gender, address and the like, as you do your KYC while onboarding investors or customers on your platform.
The latest layer we’ve embellished our product with is OTP-based Aadhaar Verification, which lets you do offline KYC verification by validating the registered mobile number linked with the 12-digit Aadhaar number. Talk about making Aadhar KYC simple and paperless!
Vendor Verification for Easy Split
It is important to have vital information about your vendors – and equally important to ensure they aren’t dissatisfied. And, one primary cause of dissatisfaction is delayed settlements and payment reversals. Moreover, ensuring that vendor payments aren’t fraught with fraudulent transactions is paramount.
This year, we introduced Vendor Verification for all our Easy Split merchants to help solve these problems. It allows businesses like you to check each vendor’s bank account number, IFSC, name match and UPI ID, so that you can make timely and accurate payments to vendors without the risk of fraud or reversals.
Issuance as a Service (IaaS)
One of our biggest launches this year has been our Issuance as a Service stack – a low-code solution that lets you create your own, custom-branded card. What’s more – you can launch it in physical form, a digital card, an e-wallet, or even as wearables.
So, whether it be creating your rewards program, streamlining expense management or managing employee incentives, issuance can help you set it up in as less as three weeks.
Token Vault
Regulatory compliance is central to everything we build. In line with the directives of RBI, we created Token Vault – our Tokenization solution, to make card payments more secure. This past year, we tokenised cards for businesses across all major card networks in India.
Advances
Among the many things a business needs to run successfully is affordable and easily accessible working capital. We set out to address this with our product, Advances.
Advances allows businesses to avail of loans at best-in-the-market interest rates, with minimal documentation and 100% paperless disbursals. You could also customize your repayment schedule in a way that aligns with you cash flow.
UniFi
We launched UniFi this year at the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2022, as a solution for businesses to connect, consolidate, and control your finances from across banks, on a single dashboard.
UniFi can help you manage your disbursals at scale, keep an eye on your cash flows, and allow you to transact 24×7, even on bank holidays, while seamlessly switching bank accounts.
Simplifying Cross-Border Payments
Investing in stocks abroad is common, but it hasn’t traditionally been easy for Indian investors. For the longest time, the process has involved funding accounts overseas to purchase or trade stocks. We built our Cross-border Payments solution to let investing platforms enable their users to buy foreign stock using local payment methods such as UPI.
We demonstrated the robustness of our offering as part of the second cohort of RBI’s Regulatory Sandbox. And, we became one of the four payment service providers in the country to have received their approval!
Partnering for growth
This year also brought us many fruitful alliances, which will go a long way in developing synergies and creating seamless payments experiences. We built some significant business partnerships with Shopify, Zoho, Tally, Edchemy, Travclan and Wix among many others.
Event & Payments Partnerships
We always look up to events that encourage a spirit of innovation and resilience. Therefore, we like to mark our presence on such platforms, many times, by sponsoring and driving the events.
Events have been instrumental in cementing our presence as a potent force in Indian fintech. And, with t
We were the Payments Partner for Shark Tank Season 1 – the debut season that kicked off in December 2021 and went on to become an audience favourite. In 2023, we’re returning as the Payments Partner for Season 2 of Shark Tank India, that goes on air in January. Watch out for our new brand campaign!
We were also the Payments Partner of Global Fintech Fest 2022, a four-day mega event with over 7,000 attending delegates from across the world came together to discuss four pillars: Planet, People, Prosperity, and Principles of Governance, to build a sustainable financial sector and consequently a sustainable and inclusive world.
As Payments Partner, we powered D2C Summit 3.0 by Inc42– India’s largest D2C & e-commerce conference that brought together leading D2C, e-commerce and retail brands and founders to help level up their e-commerce businesses. The event featured 5000+ attendees with 75+ speakers across two days.
We also became the Payments Partners of the Elets AatmaNirbhar Bharat Summit & Awards, which brought together key officers and policy makers from Government of India & State Governments, policy think tanks and industry leaders on a common platform to discuss issues, challenges and transformational opportunities, and build upon the clarion call given by our Hon’ble Prime Minister for the making of an AatmaNirbhar Bharat.
We also drove the Fintech Session at 25th Bengaluru Tech Summit, 2022 addressing 5,000 delegates and over 50,000 visitors.
Awards and recognition
This year was not only eventful, but also rewarding. We were named the Best Payment Aggregator at Global Fintech Fest, 2022. Further along, we also won the CXO Tech Innovation Award 2022 for Instant Payments Disbursal.
We made it to the Deloitte India Technology Fast 50 list for the second year in a row. We also became the Finalists for the Fintech Startup of the Year Award and for the Excellence in Payments Award at IFTA 2022.
Our burgeoning family
We are now a family of over 842 Cashiens – up by 148% since last year. While some of us enjoy the flexibility of working remotely, most of us are back in office and sharing some great camaraderie.
Retreats, offsites, and in-house events have been instrumental in building great connections within and across teams. One such massive event was Switch On – our first organisation wide hackathon, designed to foster innovation and cross-team collaboration.
The days of the hackathon were far too eventful and memorable to be encapsulated in mere words. But, to sum up the event in numbers, we had 246 participants across 57 teams, with 19 mentors to guide them, 23 volunteers that brought this fantastic event to life, and ₹6.75 lakh in prizes given to our hackathon and contest winners.
We also had a session for women under #IAmRemarkable, an initiative by Google which motivated them to celebrate their work achievements.
Along with growth, this year brought us opportunities to take our footprints to newer locations. We set up a new office at DLF CyberCity, Gurgaon (Delhi NCR) which is now functional for teams operating out of Delhi. We also recently inaugurated a new office in the Mangaluru cluster. For Mumbai folks, we got a new workplace at BKC.
Giving back to the community
We’ve always given immense importance to contributing to social causes. This year, we partnered with Many Hands, an NGO that works for child health and welfare. With this partnership, we hope to make a difference in the lives of the young, and giving them a shot at building healthy, productive and prosperous future.
We’re also kicking off a new initiative in the year to follow to celebrate Cashiens while going green. On the birthday of each employee, we’ll plant a tree in their name – a legacy that will live on, and benefit both present and future generations.
In the news
Wrapping up
2022 has been quite the roller coaster ride – one full of lessons, achievements, and lots of memories. The year has endowed us with wisdom, resolve, and motivation, to scale even greater heights.
We stand at the threshold of the new year, stronger, wiser, and more resolute than ever before – ready to bring the best of fintech and banking to the businesses that we celebrate and are so proud to serve.
2023, here we come!
