Cashfree: Year in Review 2020

Table of Contents

The beginning of 2021 has been pretty exhilarating for us at Cashfree. From making it to Y Combinator’s Top Companies 2021, to getting featured by Inc 42 as Top 7 Fintech Startups to Watch Out for in 2021, this surely looks like a great start to the year.

But let’s rewind…

Year 2020. This year was all about adapting to the new reality. For businesses it was a mixed year: a few industry segments like travel and tourism saw some dips, for a few it was an year of opportunity, like, Gaming, Edtech etc., while other businesses rethought their business model and jumped on to the online commerce wagon.

We at Cashfree stood with you and worked with you towards adapting to the new world and finding growth opportunities leveraging on the robust payments infrastructure we created over the years.

In 2020 we launched new products, grew in transaction volume, and achieved some major milestones that we are proud of.

We want to give you a tour of our personal best:

Collections

Cashfree Payment Gateway

We kickstarter 2020 with the launch of advanced Payment Gateway features like Instant Refund as part of the three-tier model Refunds Suite and Instant Settlements among other releases.

With the onset of the pandemic as more and more businesses went online, we helped them get on to the online commerce wagon with the widest range of payment gateway integrations for both mobile and web.

Key highlights and developments

Launched Instant Settlements to give businesses access to funds within 15 minutes of payment capture
With focus on friction-less mobile payments – we built new mobile SDKs including React Native SDK, Flutter SDK, Cordova SDK and Xamarin SDK in addition to existing Android and iOS SDK
Introduced dynamic routing for UPI transactions for higher success rates
Introduced UPI intent flow for Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm to provide better customer experience for UPI payments.
Introduced UPI new collect flow to reduce drop offs and improve conversions
Easy Split phase 1 launched with transaction split capability to support multiple vendor payments
Right after the release of Android 11, we helped app based businesses get Android 11 ready in less than 90 days of Android 11 release
Introduced Third Party Validation on Net banking and UPI for BFSI sector businesses
Directly integrated with Allahabad Bank and RBL to enable higher success rate and faster net checkouts via Net banking at lowest cost. We now offer Netbanking option on 80+ banks
Integrated with Amex for smooth international transactions

Refunds Suite

We launched India’s first comprehensive Refunds Suite to make refunds faster and frictionless for India. The unique three-tier solutions model now supports 15,000 businesses. At the onset of the global outbreak, Refunds Suite helped businesses like Pharmeasy, Medlife, Nykaa, ClubFactory, ixigo, and Grofers’ Orange Something etc tackle the surge in refund requests.

Now do Partial or full refunds for online or COD orders with Cashfree. Know more.

Recurring payments in India

After collaborating with NPCI and launching UPI Autopay, we became India’s most comprehensive recurring billing platform by offering recurring payments on cards (both credit and debit) and e-mandate on netbanking and UPI. Now, accept repeat payments with Cashfree Subscription Management solution.

Debit card support added for E-Mandate services through NetBanking and debit card
Mandate creation now supported on 7 new banks via Net Banking, 5 new banks for Debit card
We added support for Current Accounts for Mandates
To make recurring payments NPCI compliant, we added ability to notify End Customer 24 hours before we charge any subscriptions
[What’s more] In addition to fixed amount repeat payments, use Cashfree for accepting on-demand payments. Get in touch to know more.

Autocollect

We launched AutoCollect, Cash Management Service 2.0 in 2019 to help businesses match inbound payments to customers automatically. In 2020 Autocollect became more powerful with integrations with multiple banks ensuring the highest success rate with the best of the banking and UPI infrastructure.

Key highlights:

We added ICICI Bank and IDFC Bank to our partner banks list to enable virtual account creations using multiple banks and reduce dependency on a single bank
Easy to remember custom UPI handles – We now support fully alpha numeric UPI handles on IDFC and alpha numeric Prefixes on ICICI Bank UPI handles.
Reconciliation – We made reconciliation tracking and handling more seamless by introducing MIS reconciliation on Yes Bank UPI handles (both @yesbank and @yesbankltd prefixes) , Yes Bank Virtual bank accounts, ICICI Bank virtual accounts and IDFC virtual bank accounts
YES Bank pandemic – Leveraging on our agile product development and multiple integrations amid the Yes Bank crisis we migrated 1 Million Yes Bank enabled UPI handles to ICICI within the first 100 hours of the announcement of the moratorium.

Disbursal

Payouts

Launched in 2016, Payouts is currently being used by over 5000 companies in India for vendor payouts by marketplaces; e-commerce refunds, wage payouts; loan disbursement; insurance claims processing; expense reimbursements and reward payouts. Payouts registered more than 300% growth during the pandemic induced lockdown period. Read the story featured on Yahoo News! .

IFSC Verification

Added IFSC Verification to our Verification Suite.

Merchants can now quickly verify bank and branch information in bulk. It was added as a part of our Payouts, Bank Account Verification and Cashgram flow to offer real-time feedback and increase success rates. Click here to know more.

Card Payouts

We added support for Payouts to credit and debit cards. Today we leverage IMPS, NEFT, VISA and MASTERCARD networks to successfully process card payouts.

Structural and Routing Improvements

Payouts was built to support volume. This time we significantly bolstered our systems and are now supporting high volume merchants for up to 1000 transactions per second. The addition of multiple banking gateways, internal routing and retry logic enables us to offer best-in-market success rates.

Watch this space for more updates as we continue to work with our partner banks to rebuild the digital payments banking infrastructure.

Cashgram

Cashgram got better in 2020. We added advanced features like recipient name verification and Maker-checker flow for creation and redemption of Cashgram to help you do accurate payouts to your users without having to collect their bank account details. Know more