Pradeep Chakraborty caught up with Ritesh Agarwal, CEO and co-founder, fonePaisa, for a conversation. Excerpts:

BW: What is fonePaisa's uniqueness?

Ritesh Agarwal: fonePaisa is a payment service provider enabling non-cash payment between consumers and merchants, and between businesses.

For B2C merchants, non-cash payment modes include credit/debit card, bank accounts and 15+ prominent mobile wallets, including Paytm, Freecharge, mobikwik and Oxigen. fonePaisa enables merchants to accept all digital payment methods using a single account, while consumers can pay using the app or the browser on their smartphone. 

Businesses face significant challenges in matching payments received against invoices. fonePaisa's intelligent invoice collection and account reconciliation system eliminates  labour-intensive and error-prone manual reconciliation while reducing the daily sales outstanding. 

This helps businesses arrest their revenue leakage, without any additional investment in  IT and without even need to integrate with fonePaisa. fonePaisa works on all basic, and smartphones, tablets and desktops across any operating system. In addition to the above, fonePaisa QR codes can be scanned without an app as well.

BW: How highly scalable and robust payment engine is the platform?

Ritesh Agarwal: fonePaisa is designed by veteran architects of Finacle core-banking software and it has made it a robust platform, even for the banks to evaluate for their digital payment initiatives. 

fonePaisa is leveraging on it’s technical platform under SaaS model. The technology is highly modular and it makes it easy for any stakeholder to consider either as a bundle solution or in parts.

The payments engine is PCI DSS certified, the de facto security standard for payment engine security.

The payment engine can process 5000 TPS (transactions per second) and is connected to several partners to ensure dynamic routing and also load balancing.

The platform offers the following modules:

* Invoice collection and recon engine
* Payment engine
* Bill module
* Wallet technology
* Alternate technology module [QR, Audio-Interface, RFID and devices].

BW: Who are these 10,000 merchants based on their credit cycle - name the verticals? 

Ritesh Agarwal: fonePaisa has B2B and B2C merchant segments. The B2B segment has its own merchant eco-system, and today, fonePaisa facilitates various payment products for more than 15k merchants on B2B platform. 

On B2C platform, a few key merchant categories are:

* Kitchenware and appliances
* Consumer electronics
* E-commerce
* Tours and travel.
* Restaurants
* Educational institutes.

We are increasing our focus in the utilities segment, large manufacturers for our virtual account based reconciliation platform. We are also working with multiple banks to partner in their journey for digital payments. 

BW: How does it solve the problems for businesses and individuals along with a perspective of the overall payment industry and digital economy? 

Ritesh Agarwal: Conventional payment gateways offer instruments such as cards, bank accounts and UPI. Most of them offer a few wallets. fonePaisa has done the following 

* Aggregated 15 different wallets, EMIs, Cards, UPI and Net banking
* Integrated with virtual accounts to lower the cost of transaction and also to process large sums
* API-based hosted wallet solution to allow merchants to create their own closed loop wallet system to reward their customers
* Split settlements for marketplaces to split payments between the market place and seller
* Allow consumers to scan QR codes without an app and pay, thereby obviating the need for an app
* Allow brands to run EMI subvention schemes using our integrated payment platform. 

These are real big problems that fonePaisa is solving for its merchants.

Today, merchants are being rejected on flimsy reasons and charges are being levied, beyond anyone’s understanding. fonePaisa keeps a very transparent pricing, with an easy to reconcile transactions; wherein merchants are now not forced to do EoD batch settlement.