Interview with Mr. Balaji Jagannathan, Co-founder, and Director – Paycorp.io

Paycorp.io is a payment service company founded in 2020 by a group of five spirited entrepreneurs –  Karthik Thenkarai, Prashant Maroli, Balaji Jagannathan, Anish Thomas, and Ivan Fernandes.

A digital platform for complete Direct to Customer payments, Paycorp.io is a smart solution for all kinds of recurring payments. With its instant and assured B2B recurring auto-debit solutions, the payment gets completed the same day as against the time taking procedures with standard industry solutions.

The payment solution provider further takes the edge over the payment mandate registration success rate, which is 95% in the case of Paycorp as against 65% in traditional modes, which increases the annual revenue to their customers by more than 2%. Paycorp.io also makes customer onboarding a zero error proposition and the resultant cost saving can directly add to the bottom line of the corporate.

The recurring auto-debit solution provider is equipped with varied payment options, such as ACH, UPI, cards, etc., and creates multiple digital touchpoints like WhatsApp, link push, and portal for ease of access. Paycorp.io is currently serving 27 customers including major banks, NBFCs, businesses, and other key sectors like healthcare, road, transport, insurance, etc.

The company has a direct interface with six major banks and plans to expand this network by another 6 before the next quarter.

Driven by innovation, the company enables DIY onboarding for quick customer acquisition, along with Predictive Analytics to maximize payments success rate. The other USP includes tailored automated payment solutions for EMI, Rentals, and Insurance claims, among others.

The company has plans to expand into the Middle East and the USA market beyond the current Pan-India presence.

Mr. Balaji Jagannathan, Co-founder, and Director, of Paycorp.io, is a driven entrepreneur who is extremely methodical, systematic, and meticulous. He has had an exemplary career for over two decades in the global payments space.

His unique skillset combination of software product development cost accounting background and banking eventually led him to foray into the banking and payments automation domain.

Armed with strong insights about banking across different geographies, Balajialong with the other co-founders of the company zeroed in on banking payments as the growing segment that sought deep hands-on experience to identify pain areas and solve them.

Before his entrepreneurial plunge, banking automation products developed by him in the past have been integrated with several banks across different countries, including India, UAE, UK, Malaysia, and Brunei.

He is credited for building a strong intellectual property in the niche payments space which has processed over a billion payments transactions with 100% availability over a decade in operation.

As the co-founder and CEO of Paycorp.io, he is responsible for spearheading organizational strategy formulation, finance, branding, marketing, and new market penetrations. An MBA in education, Balaji Jagannathan is fond of learning new languages, reading books, watching movies, wildlife and blogging. A firm believer in trusting and entrusting, he sees his role model in the likes of Roger Federer and Rahul Dravid.

1. How fintech companies are impacting the digital payment processes

Digital payments need to be secure, quick, reliable, and convenient to become successful and widespread.

The pre-requisite for a secure digital payment is a strong authentication mechanism, a robust identity verification process, and an impenetrable messaging network. A reliable digital payment involves the ability to scale up and down the services with volume, elastically.

Similarly, the medium of transaction such as smart apps or embedded payment mechanisms must be simple, intuitive, and easily accessible to consumers. Fintechs with specialization in each aspect of payments improve digital payments progressively.

 

2. How has technology made payments and collection easy for businesses

All businesses, without any exception, depend on their collection for a healthy financial state. The smoother the collection process, the better the financial health of the business. Businesses that have efficient payment and collection systems and processes benefit from better cash flows, predict their growth more accurately and monitor performance against plan, better.

Payments technology today works at three different levels. At the first level, it enables smooth payments and collections through the elimination of manual tasks within flows and enables proactive methods to maximize success in payments and collections such as smart reminders.

At the second level of payments, analytics helps businesses predict and plan their payments and finances better, delivering efficiency of financial resources. At the third level, payments technology standardizes and forms an ecosystem of payments such as IMPS network, and Account Aggretagors, elevating the payments landscape to a better plane altogether benefiting the entire society.

 

3. How recurring payment solutions are helping the end users

Traditionally, there has not been a dedicated solution to address recurring payments. Therefore, recurring payments have been managed by collecting cheques for all the payments or by the payer initiating a fresh payment each time.

A recurring solution such as EMI payments has been managed through standing instructions as well, which was manual in nature. However, in the recent past, ACH-based payment solutions have revolutionized recurring payments.

Businesses can now instantly set up ACH mandates for their customers to pay at regular intervals. Such mandates will be authorized and authenticated within seconds so that even an across-the-counter transaction can be converted into EMIs payments in no time without involving a credit card.

 

4. Can you highlight the role of Analytics in Fintech services

Analytics today has evolved to a whole new level with the advent of machine learning. Analytics and prediction technology has contributed significantly to the sophistication in modeling the future of business under different possible conditions leaving very little to guesswork.

Today’s analytics models have made longer-term future decisions with a fair degree of accuracy possible. The longer we know into the future about our financial position, the better our preparedness.

The flexibility of financial operations today is greatly enhanced with the confident knowledge of our future. This is what today’s analytics can offer to businesses.

 

5. What’s your take on the current industry scenario? Funding has become sporadic and layoffs are becoming more common.

The capital available for investment has pretty much dried up. Almost no investor today is taking a bet on new ideas at present.

It is time for businesses that are dependent on investments for operations, to conserve their capital and deploy them very wisely and on revenue expenditure only for at least a year.

The only way to counter layoff is to equip oneself with skills that are useful to the organization. The ability to sell, the ability to cause customer delight, and proactiveness as a habit are all useful to any organization beyond the core capability.

 

6. Which trends do you see emerging in 2023?

The year 2023 will be a year of caution for businesses across industries. With inflation being so high and unemployment catching up, spending will be cautious.

Therefore, businesses which can deliver the most relevant value at a very reasonable cost will be able to benefit from the opportunity.

It is important to differentiate our business through the high quality of product/service along with high-quality customer care. The real trick is to do this at a very low operational cost.