Gone are the days when only the English language can be used by social media users to communicate. Thanks to various social media apps and the development of technology, people are now able to use their regional language while handling social media. Communication is possible for everyone and they are able to use the language they prefer without any problem.
When it comes to India, with a population of over 1.3 Billion people, the country is known for its diversity. As per the constitution of India, it has 22 scheduled languages and in total it has 121 languages.
Time has changed and the people of India are avid users of the internet, especially social media and they can do this in their native languages. In this article, we will talk about the report that is being released by ShareChat and GroupM called ‘Bharat- The Neo India’ and how businesses can benefit from it.
“Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.” -Casey Miller
Bharat – The Neo India is a report comprised of ShareChat and GroupM both of them jointly conducted research to find out about the situation of the people who use the internet in their native language.
This report will help brands and businesses to understand online behaviour, the trends of internet consumption, and the way people use social media. People who are using Indic languages are called Bharat and people who prefer using the English language are referred to as India.
Why the Report is Important?
The report made after the thorough research is important because of the reasons below:
This will help the businesses to understand the behaviour of the people who uses the internet in their native language.
It will help the businesses to form a proper marketing strategy to grab the attention of Bharat and engage them in their business.
It will expose all the common misconceptions regarding the people who prefer the Indic languages while using the internet.
Bharat vs India: Which One is More Tech Savvy?
The report stated all the information of internet users of Bharat and India, their media behaviour, choice of content, lifestyle, interest, and others. Some of the findings from the report are stated below.
Bharat or the people who prefer Indic languages can be found throughout the country, in fact, 39% of them are from the metro cities and 53% are from the non-metro cities. The survey was conducted by YouGov on 3432 people from 17 Indian states who are active internet users who put their input into it.
Financial Activities
Bharat users are quite aware and in the same range as the Indian users in terms of completing any financial activities online. In fact, people who prefer Bharat are using online payment mode more than Indian users. 56% of Bharat users complete their monetary transactions through net banking and online debit card transactions.
Not only that, 49% of them use mobile wallets. Bharat users are quite aware of mutual funds, cryptocurrency, stocks, and other new-age investments and are naturally investing in them as well.
Social Media
When it comes to social media, Bharat users seem more occupied with it than Indian users. 29% of Bharat users post daily on social media, instead of 22% of Indian users. 39% Bharat uses Social media for consuming News as its primary source.
Streaming
The online video streaming platform is a prime source of entertainment nowadays. Streaming videos are more popular amongst Bharat users than watching TV. 50% of Bharat users love to watch free videos while 47% indulge in watching TV.
Food
In the case of ordering food online, 42% of Indian users indulge themselves in it compared to 24% Bharat users.
Voice Search
When it comes to using the technology of Voice search, 26% of Bharat users seem to use it compared to just 15% of Indian users.
Online Shopping
Online shopping by Bharat users has increased and in 2021, 46% of them purchased gadgets online. Apart from that, apparel, beauty products, skincare products, and any kind of booking related to travelling.
All these findings state, that the native language users are not far away from English language users and are maintaining their digital presence quite well. They are technologically aware and are using different platforms and are enjoy the digitalization of everything.
Some Other Facts of Bharat Users
Every one in five-person who uses social media in their preferred Indic language is investing in Cryptocurrency. 27% of Bharat users pay for using video streaming platform services and 37% of them use the internet for listening to music.
The article concludes that an internet user who prefers their native language is not at all far away from English language users. They have adapted themselves and some Bharat users are even more comfortable in using the digital facilities than the Indian users. They are educated and digitally aware.
As per the report, it seems Bharat is much more Tech-savvy than India. Businesses can now easily form their market strategy and can touch the market that they were not able to in the past.
FAQ
What is Bharat – The Neo India?
The Neo India is a report comprised of ShareChat and GroupM, both of them jointly conducted research to find out about the situation of the people who use the internet in their native language.
How many languages are there in India?
India has 121 languages and 22 scheduled languages.
What is the difference between Bharat and India?
People who use Indic languages are called Bharat and people who prefer using the English language are referred to as India.
Auditing plays a pivotal role in the financial maintenance of a company. It can be seen as the analysis of a company’s accounts to ensure that it complies with the laws of the land, which is undertaken independently.
From small businesses to multi-national juggernauts, tracking and keeping records of all the financial activities is a challenging proposition. Audit firms have become an irreplaceable part of the modern business landscape. But why would one consult an audit firm? What does the cream of the crop offer for business? Read on to find out more.
Hiring an audit firm to go through the company’s account serves a wide range of purposes some of which are:
The main reason to conduct an audit of the company is compliance i.e. to meet the requirements and regulations of the industry. The risks involved with non-compliance far outweigh the cost and temporary inconvenience caused by an audit company.
A thorough audit gives an outsider’s view of the organization on the systems and controls, thereby providing a unique opportunity to identify flaws and improve on internal controls, business systems, efficiency, etc.
An audit gives an impartial verification of the financial position of the company this gives a sense of trust and confidence in the stakeholders and future investors.
Almost all industries are vulnerable to fraud and malpractices at different levels of administration. An audit can help the company to identify and effectively deal with these discrepancies.
An audit can help highlight the upcoming changes in company law, and taxation and ensure that the clients are prepared well in advance.
Performing audits at regular intervals can help improve the credit ratings of the business. Higher credit scores help the business to acquire new loans from the banks easily.
Top Audit Firms in India
Having understood the importance of hiring an audit firm to do the yearly object, let us explore some of the most popular audit firms in India.
Deloitte
Deloitte – Top Auditing Firms in India
Deloitte or Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited is a professional network of services with offices in more than 150 countries in the world. Forming a part of the Big Four among auditing firms, it has the largest network of professional services networks in the world by the number of professionals working and revenue.
Founded by William Welch Deloitte in the year 1845 in London, Deloitte became a global player with mergers with industry leaders such as Touche Ross, Haskins & Sells. The firm is a United Kingdom private company, limited by guarantee and supported by a large group of independent legal entities. Notable employees of Deloitte include Sharon Thorne and Punit Renjen.
Founded in the late 1990s, Deloitte India has been an ever-present figure in the Indian auditing landscape. As per the regulation of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India or the ICAI, foreign firms are not allowed to carry out audits in India. Deloitte operators under the name of C.C. Chokshi & Co. With more than eight offices Deloitte is located in four major cities:
PricewaterhouseCoopers or more commonly known as PwC is an international network of service firms operating under the PwC brand. Pwc is a part of the Big Four with Deloitte, EY and KPMG with offices in more than 157 countries. The majority of the workforce is located in the Americas and Asia accounting for 52 per cent of the total workforce
PwC was formed by a merger between Coopers & Lybrand with Price Waterhouse in September of 1998. The firm has associations with Booz & Company, BGT PArtners and NSI DMCC. Analogous to other professional service firms, each member firm of PwC is a financially and legally independent entity. Top employees include Sanjeev Krishan and Robert Mortiz.
Founded in 2008, Pwc has established itself in the Indian market. Spearheading community development projects such as The New Equations and the PwC India Foundations, the firm has been actively contributing to the development of society as a whole. With the headquarters in the nation’s capital of Delhi, some of the other locations are:
A part of the Big Four of accounting firms ever since its formation Ernst & Young Global Limited has one of the largest professional accounting service networks in the world. Similar to other major accounting firms, EY has expanded its markets into strategy, operations, human resources, technology and financial services consulting.
Ernst and Young is the result of several high profile mergers over the last 150 years, with Harding & Pullein being the oldest of these firms founded in 1848. Some of the other key mergers include Arthur Young & Co, Ernst & Ernst and the famous Whinney, Smith& Whinney. Carmine Di Sibio chairman and CEO of the firm is one of the many global leaders associated with EY.
Though EY cannot directly operate in India, one of its member firms S.R. Batliboi & Company has been auditing for more than 85 years now. The firm has been growing cumulative average rate of 45 per cent for the past four years in the country. EY in India is often called a one-man show owing to its dynamic and aggressive business leader Rajiv Memani. Ernst and Young have offices in several key states including:
A collaboration of British and Dutch professional services Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler commonly known as KPMG forms one of the Big Four. Located in over 140 countries and employing over 200 thousand it has established itself as a leader in the global accounting arena.
First started in 1987 as a merger of Peat Marwick International and Klyneld Main Goerdeler the company experienced rapid growth throughout the decades. The oldest component, Grace Darbyshire & Todd was founded in 1818. In recent years KPMG has changed its United States branch as BearingPoint through an initial public offering. A key figure in the KPMG hierarchy is Bill Thomas the global chairman.
With the first branch opening in the August of 1993, the Indian branch of KPMG has seen a noteworthy presence in the company. KPMG has its presence in all major cities including:
In public accounting, taxation, and other business advisory services Binder Dijk Otte or BDO is establishing itself as an internationally recognised brand. BDO has an estimated income upwards of $10.3 billion and member firms in over 160 countries, thus making it one of the fastest-growing firms in the world.
With a comparatively shorter history as compared to other auditing firms, BDO was established in Australia in 1975. Having successful mergers with firms such as Nelson Parkhill and Horwath BDO growth has been rapid. Key names in the firm include founders Bernhard Binder, Hans Otte and the Global CEO Keith Farlinger.
BDO India is a key player in the global BDO organisation with over 3,500 employees operating nationwide. BDO offices are located in key cities such as:
A powerful and influential multinational accounting firm RSM International forms the 6th largest accountancy network in the world in terms of annual revenue. Headquartered in London, United Kingdom, RSM has generated approximately $6.3 billion as of 2020.
The history of RSM has its humble beginning in 1964 when it was a small network called DRM. The growth of the company was cemented in 1993 when it was rebranded by changing its name to RSM International. The founding members of Robson Rhodes and Salustro Reydel were absorbed by Grant Thornton and KPMG respectively. Ms Jean Stephens became the first CEO of the accounting firm in 2006 thereby making her the first female CEO of an international accounting firm.
RSM India Private Limited was incorporated on 08 February 2000. The company went on to have a merger with PWC in 2007 thus making the group the country’s largest accounting firm. RSM has a moderate presence in India with locations in important cities such as
Public accounting and consulting firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom, Baker Tilly International is the tenth largest accounting firm. Having an established presence in over 147 countries with 126 member firms the company recognizes member firms that operate in more than one country as one member.
Formed as a result of the merger of five firms in India Baker Tilly became the country’s sixth-largest firm. A notable merger in the company’s history came in August 2020 when Baker Tilly US merged with Squar Milner, LLP.
One of the leading accounting and consulting firms in India Baker Tilly DHC has been a strong presence in the land. Founded under the leadership of Mr Dilip B. Desai Baker Tilly acquired five smaller firms including R Kothari & Co, Spearhead Services to become a strong competitor to the Big Four.
Nexia International is an integrated network of independent services with more than 32,000 employees worldwide. Nexia also has the proud distinction of being one of the leading black-owned audit and advisory firms and among the top ten of international auditing firms networks.
Founded in the same year as the birth of the South African democracy in 1994, Necai grew rapidly to become the company’s top firm. In March 1998, the firm joined the international association SC International, which merged with Nexia International in 2006.
Nexia has offices located in several cities including:
Crowe Global is a global professional services network. Previously known as Crowe Horwath International it is the 9th largest global accounting network in terms of revenue. The firm consists of over 200 member firms in more than 120 countries.
Hungarian immigrants Ernest and Edmund founded Horwath & Horwath in New York, which will later go on to form Crowe Global. Initially focused on the hospitality industry the practice expanded to include accounting and auditing. With rapid growth from the 60’s Crowe Chizek became a member of the global Horwath & Horwath International Associates. The company was rebranded in 2018 to the network name Crowe across their independent member firms.
Crowe Global has its presence in India under the name of Crowe Advisory Services (India) LLP with offices in over 8 cities. The assurance and certification wing is provided by an independent accounting firm V.P. Thacker & Co. The firm has offices in 8 cities:
Auditing firms have become a quintessential part of the success of a business. Ever-growing business demands bring a unique set of challenges that require the third eye to solve. Auditing can often go a long way in saving the company large sums of money by spotting errors and providing solutions before it becomes irreversible. Audit firms can provide the support and guidance needed to lift any company to new and better peaks.
FAQs
What are the top audit firms in India?
Some of the top audit firms in India are:
Deloitte
PWC
Ernst and Young
KPMG
BDO
RSM
Baker Tilly
Nexia International
Crow Global
What are the Big 4 Indian accounting companies?
The big four accounting companies and top audit firms in India are:
Deloitte
PwC
EY
KPMG
How many audit firms are there in India?
There are more than 2000 audit firms in India.
Who is the No 1 chartered accountant in India?
Kumar Mangalam Birla is the most popular Chartered accountant in India.
What do auditing firms do?
Auditing firms check, verify and measure the accounts by an independent authority to ensure that all activities of accounts are done in a fairly. They ensure compliance with laws and regulations and maintain timely, fair, and accurate financial reporting.
The biggest digital payment brand, dominating the whole digital transactions companies around the globe, is Visa. Visa Inc. is widely famous across the globe and serves over 200 countries and numerous territories. Visa facilitates dozens of services at a broad level to the individual consumers, financial institutions, governments, and merchants. It offers authorization, settlements, and clearing services in the smoothest manner.
Visa Inc. does not issue debit or credit cards although it does authorize the service of debit, credit, and prepaid cards to the enterprises as well as consumers. Visa gains its most profitable deals by selling services to various financial businesses and merchants, acting as the middleman. Visa’s biggest business strategy comes from expanding its presence to various digital payments, E-Commerce, and others. The biggest rival to Visa is Mastercard Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. in the market. In this article, we will discuss the business model of Visa and how it makes money! Let’s get started.
Visa Inc. is a prominent global digital payment company that acts as the middleman in facilitating consumers, financial institutions, government, and other businesses. Visa’s services are available in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe.
The American multinational corporation, Visa works as a financial services provider headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. Visa was founded by Dee Hock in 1958 as the BankAmericard.
Visa is known as the second-largest debit and credit card payment corporation, after China’s UnionPay. This data is based on the number of card payments made and the number of card issues of the company, annually. Apart from this, Visa is the leading banking card company in the whole world, dominating around 50% market share of the entire card payments.
Where does Visa Operate?
Visa is a global payment company that serves more than 200 countries and territories, worldwide. It’s four secured data centers operated in Highlands Ranch, Colorado; Singapore; Ashburn, Virginia, and London, England.
Key Products and Services of Visa
Visa Inc. offers tons of services to its consumers such as clearing, authorization, and settlement services. Its major services and products are:
Services: Clearing, Authorization, and Settlement services. Moreover, mobile payments, top-up services, and money transfers.
Products: Visa provides its allotted credit cards, commercial cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, and other mobile and money transaction-based products.
Visa majorly targets the people with a good income to spend and those who need credit points. The company targets its consumers through various channels such as banks or other financial institutions.
The digital payment company believes in providing consumers with the utmost convenience of its stakeholders.
Business Model of Visa
Visa logo
Visa functions on a pretty different business model as compared to the conventional models. Who doesn’t have a Visa card nowadays? But it’s pretty amazing how its business model functions. The digital payment company, Visa is a publicly-traded company that comes in the listing of the New York Stock Exchange.
Visa follows the Multiple sided platform- business model. It functions by spreading its card services everywhere. And the maximum the customer through a Visa card makes will be accepted by the merchants and vice versa.
Visa mainly focuses its marketing campaigns on the customers holding Visa’s card and are the subsidy side of the company. Visa provides the best facilities for payment to consumers, businesses, and government organizations. In a further manner, Visa uses a proprietary transaction processing network of technology.
What is unique about the Business Model of Visa?
Visa’s mode of generating revenue is entirely different from any other organization. It functions with an open-loop system and follows a transaction-centric business model.
Visa’s business model is based on connecting the consumers to the business owners as the middleman. Visa’s revenue generation isn’t based on the money made by the discount offers of merchants or consumer’s membership fees for issuing the card.
Visa functions as a transaction-centric business model where it earns its revenue through the payments as well as transaction volume done from its personalized cards.
Visa charges little transaction fees from the merchants. Let’s suppose there is a certain amount the consumer transacted to the merchants. So around 2-4% of the total will be merchant fees. That 2-4% will be split between the consumers and the organization, based on the interchange fees. There is always a high risk of default payment by the consumer but the person with a Visa card keeps more generated money from the merchants.
Visa generates its revenue from transactional processing, payment volumes, and value-added assistance including dispute management, issue processing, value-added information services, loyalty services, and many more.
The revenue is distributed in four streams as Service revenue, International transitional revenues, data processing revenue, and other sources of generating more revenue.
Conclusion
Visa is an excellent digital payment company when it comes to serving customers promptly. Although it does make it the second-largest digital payment company after UnionPay of China. But apart from that, Visa is the first choice of everyone across the globe. It offers tons of amazing services to merchants, financial institutions, and others. Through this article, we got the knowledge on how the company makes its money as well as its business model. Stay tuned for more updates!
ETrade has established itself as one of the finest online brokers for trading options as a pioneer in the online brokerage sector. It was one of the first online brokers in the United States and it became the first online broker to provide commission-free trading on ETFs, stocks, and options trades in October 2019. This makes you wonder, how does ETrade make its money? And what is its business model?
A business model is a crucial component of every startup’s long-term success since it is what unlocks value. In some ways, creating a business model is more than just figuring out how to make money. With that in mind, let’s look at the ETrade e-trading platform’s business model.
ETrade, a financial services business located in New York, was formed in 1982 by William A. Porter and Bernard A. Newcomb. Over the years, the firm has grown to over 30 outlets across the United States, making it one of the industry’s pioneers.
ETrade/E*Trade is an electronic trading platform that allows novice and experienced traders to purchase and sell financial assets such as common stock, preferred stock, futures contracts, mutual funds, options, fixed-income investments, and exchange-traded funds.
Products and services offered by ETrade
Etrade earns money through various products and services, including a day trading platform for retail customers. Let’s take a brief look at the services that the firm provides.
Brokerage: E-zero-commission Trade’s US stock trading platform for ordinary clients is known as a brokerage account. They enable you to buy and sell equities, ETFs, mutual funds, potion, and bonds, among other things. At a low fee, you may also trade futures and options contracts, as well as bonds. Until their kid reaches the age of majority, a parent or guardian can handle a minor brokerage account.
Services for Portfolio Management: The portfolio management service is given to both individual and institutional clients. Portfolios can be handled both automatically and manually. Depending on your circumstances, you may also obtain a personally customised portfolio from a financial counsellor.
Bank account: Individuals, families, and companies may open a bank account with ETrade, which provides higher-interest savings and checking accounts. Free initial checks, online bill pay, and an ATM/debit card are all available. You may also use the free Transfer Money service, pay with your credit card online, and borrow against your investments.
Retirement services: ETrade offers retirement (IRA) accounts for tax savings, minor’s savings that an adult may handle for the benefit of a child until they reach the age of majority, and persons commencing their savings at the age of 59.5 years old.
ETrade has a long history as an online broker, and its platforms are well-known for being straightforward to use. And even though it offers many services, including news, research, and screeners, ETrade is still simple to use.
ETrend features a user-friendly interface that allows you to personalise the platforms according to how you want to connect with them.
ETrade offers three web-based/downloadable platforms and two mobile apps, making it an excellent alternative for passive investors and casual traders. To help optimise the value of deposits earned in its brokerage operation, it also offers banking products through the ETrade Bank, an FDIC-registered federal savings bank.
It joins a growing number of online brokers that have switched to commission-free stock, ETF, and options trading in October 2019.
ETrade Business Model
ETrade employs a strategy that generates revenue from payment for order flow as well as interest income earned on the free float. To generate income on customer funds, ETrade invests them in money market accounts. Margin rates levied on purchasing or shorting stocks on the business’s platform also generate revenue for the company.
ETrade charges no commissions, which begs the question: how does ETrade make money?
Margin
Clients at ETrade pay interest on money borrowed to buy stocks and on money borrowed to short stocks. For many broker-dealers, margin interest is a crucial source of revenue, and ETrade is no different. It has rates that are higher than the national average. Depending on the total amount borrowed overnight, they start at 8.95 per cent and go down.
Flow of Orders
ETrade makes the majority of its money through monetising its order flow. Customers’ buy and sell orders are sent to market makers for execution by ETrade. The company is compensated for the order flow in exchange.
When E-margin Trade’s customers borrow money to short or purchase stocks, ETrade receives interest. A transaction-fee mutual fund costs $19.99 to buy or sell at the business.
This is a standard business procedure; therefore, ETrade isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary here. ETrade sends orders to the groups to adjust for the order flow. This is also a frequent industry practice.
ETrade receives less than a cent per share on average for routing orders. That may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that there are about 300,000 trades each day, with several shares per order, it adds up.
Earnings from interest
ETrade advertises heavily on the need of filling your brokerage, bank, retirement, or PMS accounts with them since the more money you invest with them, the more interest you get. The business of ETrade is based on the interest produced by the float, which is invested by millions of customers. Offering free trading to retail investors is a fantastic way to improve their float because they are the least likely to trade actively.
Service charges
Portfolio management, retirement accounts, and other essential portfolio services are also profitable for ETrade. Fees and service charges are how they make money from these services.
The fees for portfolio management vary from $500 to $250,000, with a 0.30 per cent to 0.75 per cent cost.
ETrade charges $25 for premature withdrawals, excess contribution withdrawals, and re-characterisations in retirement accounts (changing from Roth IRA to Traditional IRA).
And, depending on the debit balance available at the time of the trade, margin trading costs range from 5.45 per cent to 8.95 per cent.
In the year 2019, ETrade generated $588 million in fees and service charges.
Commissions on mutual funds
ETrade charges $19.99 to buy or sell a transaction-fee mutual fund. It costs $49.99 to sell a no-load, no-transaction-fee fund fewer than 90 days after acquisition.
ETrade also profits from mutual fund trades through 12b-1 fees, sub-accounting fees, shareholder service costs, and marketing support payments.
Trading Commissions
Only ten to twenty per cent of the millions of traders are active. Active traders, on the other hand, trade often and in large amounts. And many of them trade futures and options, the most lucrative part of the stock market.
This 20% of active traders generate twenty times the money that they lose by providing free trading.
Fees for Futures, Options, and Bonds on ETrade
The larger the number of active traders operating in any of these categories, the higher the commissions because ETrade works with huge volumes rather than premium pricing.
This information makes you wonder if ETrade is losing money on these products. ETrade loses money on its free service. However, because over 80% of traders aren’t active in the markets, they don’t lose much money. ETrade lost $23 million in securities trading fees in 2019. The $23 million loss is well worth it for their business model, given the $421 million in trading commissions they receive from active traders.
FAQs
When was ETrade Financial Corporation founded?
ETrade Financial Corporation was founded in 1982.
Does ETrade charge commission?
ETrade does not charges commission for online US-listed stock, ETF, and options trades.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved byRecko.
Most entrepreneurs stress the challenge of reconciling transactions; it’s one of those necessary evils that everyone has to deal with but no one wants to do. We’ve heard individuals complain about the necessity to reconcile payments over the years in banking and payments. Over last few years, there has been a continual increase in the number of online payments, making it tough for many businesses, banks, and financial firms to keep track of expenses flowing around the organization. Recko is a corporation that specializes in financial reconciliation. Started with the mission to help businesses manage their financial operations with agility, simplicity, and innovation, Recko aids businesses that deal with several legs of payment processing as part of their daily operations in keeping track of and reconciling all financial transactions. Recko has reconciled over 250 million payments valued at over $2 billion in its first year alone.
In October 2021, Recko got acquired by San Francisco-based Fintech company Stripe. Stripe offers a wide array of services including payment and billing services, and tools for managing business operations. By acquiring Recko, Stripe is set to expand its services further. As per the deal, Recko’s entire team will join Stripe’s remote engineering hub and will work to develop and scale Stripe’s products.
About Recko and How it Works?
Through Accounting reconciliation, businesses can keep track of their transactions. With the expansion of business, reconciliation becomes a tough job. Especially with more and more online transactions being done these days, reconciliation has become even more cumbersome. This is where Recko helps.
Recko is a Software as a service reconciliation artificial intelligence-based software that assists finance teams at eCommerce marketplaces and transactional platforms in keeping track of the entire transaction cycle and business deals in order to avoid slipping and tripping hazards.
“The finance department on the merchants’ end is continuously dealing with this complexity of matching the right amount to right order, returns/ replacements and a lot of orders also move between months. All they have excels, spreadsheets and traditional ETL (extract, transform, load) tools which are cumbersome and error-prone. This is where we come into the picture,” said Saurya Prakash Sinha, Recko cofounder and CEO.
Recko was created with the goal of providing financial stability to businesses with significant transaction volumes, such as e-commerce platforms, insurance companies, and banks, by automating the entire reconciliation process. It ensures that each transaction is recorded and that all settlements are completed on time because it is an independent third-party transaction reconciliation layer.
“This also helps when customers have to be refunded as we use many different ways to make a single payment these days (including wallets, vouchers, gift cards, net banking and CC),” added Prashant Borde, cofounder and CTO at Recko.
Besides reconciliation, Recko also helps businesses in commission calculation, Payout creation, and reporting, to aid businesses to track, manage and account money end to end.
Recko’s current team consists of 60 people with extensive experience working for e-commerce and fintech companies such as Flipkart, Amazon, Nutanix, PhonePe, Ola Money, Razorpay, and others.
Recko – Logo
Recko’ s Company Logo
Recko – Founders and History
IIT Gandhinagar alumni Prashant Borde and Saurya Prakash Sinha launched Recko in 2018.
Founders of Recko – Prashant Borde and Saurya Prakash Sinha
Prashant and Saurya are serial entrepreneurs and have have robust industry experience. Prashant Borde co-founded shared computing platform GridAnts in 2012, which was later renamed Cubeit. The platform was acquired by Myntra in 2016, after which Prashant joined Jio.
Saurya worked for industry leaders like Flipkart and Phone Pe. In 2015, Saurya co-founded urban logistics and on-demand delivery platform ‘Townrush’, which was later acquired by Grofers. Saurya joined Grofers as AVP(product) after the acquisition of Townrush. In 2017, Saurya founded Recko along with Prashant.
The duo had hands on experience of developing processes that aided the product and finance teams in contributing to the company’s growth and accelerated financial governance. This led them to discover that organizations of all sizes battle to keep track of payments and face manual restrictions when it comes to reconciliation, computations, and scaled monetary operations management. Thus Saurya and Prashant decided to intervene and help businesses to manage their finances better by simplifying reconciliation, commission calculation, Payout creation, and reporting.
According to its founders, Recko reconciled transactions totaling $2 billion in its first year of business. Grofers, Dunzo, FreshMenu, and Meesho are just a few of its clients. It also has different monetizing methods in place, depending on the client’s needs, including volume and per-transaction costs.
Following are some of the primary gaps Recko is trying to close –
Unstructured data in large quantities
Use of a large number of people
Transparency and traceability of operations are lacking.
Time and expense spent on reconciliation have grown.
AI plays a role in resolving these issues on various levels. First, algorithms aid in the extraction of relevant information and analysis from more than 80% of data, which is critical in the financial domain because fintech models would be unable to function without data.
Furthermore, because they can’t always trace an error back to its source, most organizations set aside a specific proportion of revenue error to accommodate for reconciliation checks. To close this gap, Recko automates the reconciliation process, making it possible to track financial data throughout its full lifecycle. It accomplishes this by utilizing APIs to link with payment gateways, banks, and merchant order management systems, allowing firms to track receivables and uncover settlement problems. According to Recko, this reduces manpower investment by 50 percent to 60 percent.
Recko – Mission and Vision
Recko’s mission statement says, “Recko was started with the mission to help businesses manage their financial operations with agility, simplicity, and innovation. Today’s businesses need a collaborative interlock between their finance, product, and business functions to grow exponentially and stay ahead of the competition. Be it reconciliations, payment operations or complex commission calculations; Recko does it all.”
Reconciliation – Bringing your company’s transactions up to date in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and speed.
Commission Calculation – Automate your entire charge calculating procedure and keep track of external payment SLAs.
Payout – To disburse payments to customers and subcontractors, the company integrates easily with payment partners.
Recko – Business Model & Revenue Model
Recko is a B2B company, and earns revenue by charging subscription fee from its clients.
Without writing a single word of coding programs, Recko allows financial teams to ingest, enrich, and reconcile millions of transactions in hours rather than days. Recko cuts labor by 50 to 60 percent while keeping a close eye on transactions to guarantee money goes to the right parties at the right time with the correct deductions.
Recko is now processing enormous amounts of transactional data to digitize financial control within organizations, as well as developing Machine Learning models to detect abnormalities, risk, and intelligence in the money flow.
Recko – Revenue and Growth
The revenue for the Fiscal Year 2019 was USD 388K, up from USD 186K in the previous year. Recko’s customer’s includes top marketplaces like Grofers, Meesho and Dunzo.
Recko – Funding, and Investors
In its latest round of Series A funding raised on April 2020, Recko received $ 6 million. Vertex Ventures SEA and India led the financing, with Prime Venture Partners joining as an existing investor. Here are Recko’s funding details-
iPaymy, Pulse iD, SAP Concur, Sage Intacct, G2 Deals, Bill.com, Tradeshift, Invoiced, DocuWare, Spendesk, Riovic, and SureCash are among Recko’s main competitors.
Recko – Challenges Faced
The product needed to be stable because the company was working with extremely large data volumes. As they add features to the product, it continues to evolve. The aim is that the number of problems and inconsistencies will decrease as time goes on. Since the platform handles finances, the team at Recko needs to be extra careful so that nothing goes wrong.
“We needed to be precise, and we needed to be correct at scale. The crew spent a significant amount of time double-checking the figures.”, the Recko CEO said.
On the technology side, figuring out how to process these transactions was a significant issue for everyone on the team, since this used to take them over 3-4 days to handle more than 50-60 million transactions. They can now complete it in 30 minutes.
” for reconciliation, we are almost running at 100 million transactions in one hour. So the systems are becoming much faster. The idea is how do we do this at a much cheaper cost and faster. So this is where a lot of investment is going in,” said the CEO, Saurya Prakash Sinha.
Supporting scale was one of the issues they confronted. To make scale and security a basis in the architecture, Prashant says they had to redo a major portion of the first iteration.
“As we onboarded new customers, we realized that businesses looked at data very differently across industries. We did not want to leave any stone unturned, but we had a mission — to give the best of it. We added analytics, custom reports, commission calculation, and other integrations including storage services, payment gateways, and banks,” says Prashant.
The team quickly began working with clients from various industries and geographical places. Recko introduced geographies such as Southeast Asia and the European Union. Versioning was also released to support audit logs and time travel capabilities that needed to be reworked to allow future growth.
“We are planning to open APIs as well so that they can be integrated deeper into companies’ tech stack to solve a multitude of problems. Our long-term goal is to provide enough insights that enable businesses to make financial decisions in real-time,” says Prashant.
Recko – FAQs
What does Recko do?
Recko is a Software as a service reconciliation artificial intelligence-based software that assists finance teams at eCommerce marketplaces and transactional platforms in keeping track of the entire transaction cycle and business deals in order to avoid slipping and tripping hazards.
When was Recko founded?
Prashant Borde and Saurya Prakash Sinha launched Recko in 2017.
Which companies do Recko compete with?
iPaymy, Pulse iD, SAP Concur, Sage Intacct, G2 Deals, Bill.com, Tradeshift, Invoiced, DocuWare, Spendesk, Riovic, and SureCash are among Recko’s main competitors.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved byEzetap.
With mobile phones and applications changing the digital landscape, businesses have acknowledged the need for a shift in how they serve their consumers. Mobile point of sale programs, also known as mPOS apps, are becoming increasingly popular, according to industry estimates. Because of technological advancements in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, mPOS adoption has been extremely successful all over the world including India. Bangalore-based startup Ezetap is a major mPOS solution provider in India. Here is more about Ezetap, the startup’s journey, and its functions.
As of February 2018, Ezetap announced the launch of EzeSmart, a smart GPRS gateway with Aadhaar payment and eKYC that is fully accessible.
EzeSmart, which is based on Ezetap’s global payment acceptance platform, is the first POS terminal in the country that can take all types of payments, including UPI, Bharat QR, and Aadhaar Pay. It can also take payments from a variety of mobile wallets as well as credit and debit cards. It’s a smartphone-integrated terminal that lets companies run any of their system apps on it.
The company stated to the press that EzeSmart is tailored to support the strategic and technical needs of various industrial sectors, including govt., by allowing a person with an Aadhaar-linked bank account to transact conveniently by simply touching their finger on the device’s fingerprint reader. This allows microfinance companies who deploy this terminal to provide services to rural consumers and accept payments online.
What is Ezetap?
Ezetap is one of the first companies that came up with digital payment solutions in India. The company’s first product launched in 2013, was an mPOS card reader that could be connected to a smartphone via the audio jack. Currently, Ezetap has a variety of digital payment solutions that let businesses accept digital payment seamlessly. Ezetap offers tailor-made payment solutions for different sectors like small and large retail shops, eCommerce and logistics companies, and government organizations.
From businesses to cab drivers to supermarkets and pizza delivery drivers, the technology allows anyone to accept cards. Online retailers, insurance companies, restaurants, and hotels are among the clients of the company.
Ezetap started with a single payment offering and pivoted to a SaaS model in 2020. Ezetap’s payment solutions come with many attractive features like multibank acquiring and auto-reconciliation and offer a variety of value-added services that businesses can opt for.
Ezetap – Name, Logo, and Tagline
Ezetap has made making and receiving payments as easy as a tap. That’s where the company name is derived from.
Ezetap’s Company Logo
Ezetap’s tagline is, “Transforming the world of payments”.
Ezetap – Founders and History
Ezetap was founded in 2011 by Abhijit Bose and Bhaktha Keshavachar. Both the founders had previous expertise in payments and hardware firms, and they merged their talents, skills, and knowledge to create this solution.
Abhijit Bose who served as the CEO of Ezetap exited the company in 2018, after which the then CFO of Ezetap, Byas Nambisan took over as the CEO.Presently Byas Nambisan is the CEO of Ezetap.
In 2019 Bhaktha Keshavacharalso exited Ezetap to start his own deep tech startup, Chara Technologies.
Founders of Ezetap – Abhijit Bose and Bhaktha Keshavachar
At the start of the decade, Internet connectivity and smartphones were becoming commonplace in India, and e-commerce companies were gradually gaining popularity. Ezetap founders Abhijit Bose and Bhaktha Keshavachar spotted an opportunity to make payments more widely accepted in India. Ezetap became one of the first startups to try to convert Cash on delivery shipments to electronic payments, which was one of the earliest application cases for Ezetap in the year 2013.
“We built an EMV-compliant payment device that could take payments in conjunction with a commercially available smartphone and a card reader designed and assembled in India. We also created a payments SDK that would work behind a company app, hiding the complexity and compliance rigmarole of payments behind the ‘pay’ button,” Bhaktha Chaterjee, Head of Products at Ezetap.
The company chose to stop producing its own gadgets in India in 2018 and instead started sourcing them from overseas manufacturers. The Ezetap team is highly focused on improvising its services, and there are even instances where Ezetap team members accompanied e-commerce delivery agents to the doorsteps of end-users to collect feedback on the payment experience.
Ezetap – Mission and Vision
Ezetap’s mission is to empower businesses to receive payment seamlessly via any mode of payment.
Ezetap’s mission statement says, “Our Mission is to be the single platform through which businesses complete any financial transaction with their customers, supporting every instrument and method that those customers want to use”
Ezetap’s Universal payments banking partners are Citibank, HDFC Bank, American Express, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Mashreq Bank, RBL Bank, State Bank of India, and Yes Bank. The State Bank of India also partnered with Ezetap as its MPOS partner, with the goal of expanding electronic payments and micro-ATM to every corner of the country. However, this SBI-Ezetap partnership came to an early end. Recently Ezetap partnered with Axis Bank for Launching the My Vyapaar app, an app dedicated to retail businesses. The app comes with many features like attractive buy now pay later options and encourages digital payment by offering exciting rewards.
Ezetap – Business Model
Ezetap pivoted to a Software-as-a-Service business model, allowing retailers to accept transactions online via physical cards, internet payments, and mobile wallets with a single click via UPI, at a time when PoS firms make money from transaction fees.
The startup has altered the payment procedures of brick-and-mortar merchants, e-commerce players, enterprises, government agencies, and financial inclusion institutions using a Software-as-a-Service payments system.
Ezetap – Revenue and Growth
Ezetap’s operating revenue increased by 3% to Rs 45.06 crore in 2017-18, up from Rs 43.77 crore the previous year. According to the papers, the net loss increased to Rs 40.47 crore from Rs 30.71 crore during the period. From Rs 78.69 crore to Rs 92.17 crore, the company’s expenses climbed by 17%.
During the time, employee benefit expenses, such as provident fund, gratuity, and compensated absences, increased by 14% to Rs 33.33 crore from Rs 29.01 crore.
For the fiscal year 2017-18, total revenue was Rs 51.70 crore, up 7.77 percent from Rs 47.97 crore in 2016-17.
As per some reports, Ezetap’s valuation on June 2021 is $126 Million.
FortunePay offers comprehensive end-to-end electronic payment platforms and services to acquiring banks and merchants.
Jun 20, 2017
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Clinknow
The Best Way To Find Shoppers, Not Just Window Shoppers.
Jun 2, 2014
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Ezetap – Competitors
The top competitors in Ezetap’s competitive set are Mswipe, Innoviti, Mosambee, Pine Labs, Payswiff, ePaisa, Bijlipay, MobiSwipe, Yoyo Wallet, Obopay, STC Pay, and PayRange.
Ezetap – Challenges Faced
According to Ezetap CEO Byas Nambisan, the traditional challenge was that payments have the friction of MDR charge that requires a specific device and adoption of some software technology. And the company has been at forefront of it, for example driving down the cost of the device. When the company first got into this business, there wasn’t any device available for less than 70 USD. Ezetap was the first to get it below the 50 USD point, which was 3000 INR at that point in time. Now it’s for 800-1000 INR and less, for the device.
There were many merchants who weren’t that ready for the deployment of this mode of payment which also served as a challenge for them. But now, as everything is turning into a digital platform, whether they like it or not, merchants have started deploying the usage of digital payment solutions in their businesses to access their customers from all over the world.
Ezetap’s Universal Payments platform is unusual in that it allows businesses to accept any type of payment, anywhere, on any device, with any banking partner of the consumer’s preference. Customers will have a seamless payment experience thanks to a single integration into an organization’s current infrastructure.
While many large firms, well-known eCommerce, insurance, and mobile companies, have adopted Ezetap and adopted its integrated solution, the company sees great opportunity in developing small and medium enterprises.
Ezetap – FAQs
What does Ezetap do?
Digital payment solutions are developed by Ezetap Mobile Solutions. Ezetap offers a variety of options like POS, mPOS, UPI, and SMS pay options, kiosks with payment modules, etc.
When was Ezetap founded?
Ezetap, a Bengaluru-based startup, was founded in 2011 by Abhijit Bose and Bhaktha Keshavachar.
How does Ezetap make money?
Ezetap is a SaaS company and earns money from subscription fees.
Which companies do Ezetap compete with?
The top competitors in Ezetap’s competitive set are Mswipe, Innoviti, Mosambee, Pine Labs, Payswiff, ePaisa, Bijlipay, MobiSwipe, Yoyo Wallet, Obopay, STC Pay, and PayRange.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved byFinly.
Keeping track of expenses and payables is crucial for every business. Account Payable automation or AP automation software simplifies tasks like submitting invoices, managing approvals, and processing payments in a fast, error-free and transparent manner. This is the reason why many businesses are adopting Accounts payable automation these days. As reported by Adroit Market Research, the Account Payable Automation software market will be valued at US $ 4 Billion by 2025. One of the top companies providing this software in India is Finly. Finly also offers software for expense management, e-procurement, budgeting and offers various expense and budget-related insights that can help managers and accounting professionals take important business decisions.
In this article, we have covered all about Finly, its founders, the story behind the inception of the startup, its products, revenue, and plans.
In December 2019, Finly raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors like Gemba Capital, AngelList India, Omphalos Ventures, Social Capital, and 91springboard.
We believe the team has built a fantastic SaaS product for the global market,” said Adith Podhar, Gemba Capital managing partner. “With Finly, a CFO can time his payments to better manage cash and capture early payment discounts, reduce invoice processing time and costs, and engage the accounts payable department in more strategic, higher-value activities.” Adith added.
About Finly and How it Works?
Finly is a financial management and governance software business. It provides a platform that enables businesses to automate, get visibility into, and manage their expenditure swiftly.
Finly created cloud-based expenditure management software to automate all corporate payments and transactions. The company’s software allows businesses to use cashless transactions by providing expenditure management, money distribution, digital payments, automated collection, and vendor payments.
Finly began with a simple notion: to help businesses better understand their spending and costs. Finly was created to help your organization establish better procedures, resulting in a system that is much more cost-effective and time-efficient. They believe that by replacing standard cost reporting systems with Finly, they would be able to make the entire process more hassle-free, resulting in higher employee satisfaction.
Finly offers a SaaS component that automates all financial operations within the company. To digitize all external financial transactions, the SaaS component connects with every type of payment instrument in India (UPI/ NEFT/ IMPS/ RTGS/ Prepaid Cards/ Credit Cards) enabling businesses to make seamless transactions.
The SaaS solution allows multiple stakeholders (spender/reviewer/finance team/vendors) to interact and cooperate while giving the finance team comprehensive insight. The solution maintains all internal corporate systems up to date with real-time financial activities.
Finly maintains all corporate business systems in sync and provides the most dynamic reporting on the industry by giving the company comprehensive visibility into its spending. Their objective is to give finance teams technology and analytics that allow them to have powerful insights into their spending, allowing them to make informed strategic decisions and removing any cost management roadblocks as your company grows.
Finly offers software for company cost management, digital cash distribution, vendor payments, and GST-compliant invoicing and payments to assist businesses to automate and simplify their spending.
The ‘Fin’ in Finly refers to the company’s financial management and governance software business.
Finly’ s Company Logo
Finly’s tagline says, “Control, Optimize & Strategically Reduce Business Spend By Digitising Accounts Payable Process with a Scalable AP Automation System”
Finly – Founder and History
Veekshith Rai and Vivek A G founded Finly in 2015.
Veekshith Rai – Co-founder and CEO of Finly
Veekshith Rai and Vivek A G had been friends since they were adolescents, and after graduating from an engineering school in Bengaluru in 2012, they got interested in digital money. Veekshith worked for Mindfree Labs, and Vivek for Accion, and they both worked in IT. However, after only 3 years, they realized they had arrived at a major revenue opportunity: expenditure management.
Finly, a company expenditure, and cost management solution, was born out of this need.
“Before settling on this concept, we had honed in on five challenges we were interested in solving,” Veekshith explains. “We put together pitch decks and contacted industry experts, investors, and advisers. We froze upon Finly and developed a prototype to obtain our first set of clients after feedback, numerous revisions, and a lot of deep ideation.”
During the initial stage, the founders narrowed down possible clients regarding the problem and other factors and shared the product concept with Chief financial officers. After receiving a partial payment, they began development on the system and rolled it out in stages.
Finly – Mission and Vision
Finly’s mission and vision statement say, “Finly Corporation is committed to providing our clients with a high-quality product and outstanding service. When clients use any of our goods or services to develop projects, we try to offer them security and peace of mind. We strive to be at the forefront of innovative technology and manufacturing processes.”
Finly – Business Model
Finly is focusing on the B2B market since the B2C market has been significantly disrupted by technology like UPI and applications such as PayTM and PhonePe, which have reduced reliance on cash.
Businesses, on the other hand, continue to rely on traditional payment processing systems. This is mainly because of two reasons: banks’ ongoing concentration on major operations and their failure to consumerize modern banking technology with software commodities that address current business demands.
Finly’s business model is built on a per-user, per-month cost that is determined by the module selected by the client. They also demand a transaction fee, which is determined by the form of transaction utilized by the company.
“Payments, an integral part of financial operations, remain disconnected from current processes. But payment technologies like UPI, currently open only to the B2C segment, will further drive adoption of digital payments when rolled out to the B2B segment,” says Vivek.
Finly’s yearly revenue is now projected to be $7.1 million.
Finly’s revenue per employee is expected to be $145,000.
The founders invested little more than Rs 1 crore in the firm, which is producing close to Rs 7 crore in revenue. The founders however have not confirmed the company’s revenue.
Finly – Funding and Investors
Finly raised an undisclosed amount of funding in December 2019.
Date
Round
Amount
Lead Investors
Dec 21, 2019
Seed Round
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Das42 Capital, Gemba Capital, Social Capital, 91springboard
Finly – Competitors
Finly is a SaaS company that competes with Expensify, SAP Concur, Zoho, Pleo, G2 Storefront, Happay, and Fyle.
Finly – Challenges Faced
According to Veekshith, the road ahead isn’t really a bed of roses.
Changing the habits of finance teams is one of the company’s difficulties. However, Finly combats this challenge with a robust customer success staff that follows up with its clients after the transaction.
The other challenge for the company is having strong business professionals with a mix of sales, technology, and financial skills.
Finly presently works with over 100 clients, and is working to increase the client base. The company will add more intelligent products to its suite in future.
V Ganapathy, CEO of Axilor Ventures, says: “This market is a big opportunity and this startup helps clients track all their financial expenses. We believe Finly has figured out the market reach and is scaling fast.”
Finly gives CFOs and finance teams comprehensive insight and control over payables. All while improving Finance Teams’ productivity by over 80% via the use of a sophisticated Finance Communication Framework to automate tedious and repetitive procedures and ease wireless communication within Finance Teams. With its intelligent software Finly is all set to change the way Finance teams across industries work.
Speaking about Finly’s vision, co-founder Vivek AG says, “We think that the future generation of finance teams will not spend time on manual labor for day-to-day activities such as processing vendor payments, reconciling invoices, tracking advances, and so on. Finly will assist finance teams in important duties such as analyzing and tracking vital indicators related to the company’s growth.”
Finly – FAQs
What does Finly do?
Finly is a financial management and governance software business. It provides a platform that enables businesses to automate, get visibility into, and manage their expenditure.
Who founded Finly?
Veekshith Rai and Vivek A G founded Finly in 2015.
How does Finly make money?
Their business model is built on a per-user, per-month cost that is determined by the module selected by the client. They also demand a transaction fee, which is determined by the form of transaction utilized by the company.
Which companies do Finly compete with?
Finly is a SaaS company that competes with Expensify, SAP Concur, Expensify, Zoho, Pleo, G2 Storefront, Happay, and Fyle.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved byActive.ai.
Companies in the B2C sector segment are progressively approaching an age of automated customer service, which is enhancing the brand experience for customers, thanks to technologies like AI-powered customer support bots.
Founded in 2016, Singapore-based startup Active.ai is creating intelligent virtual assistant that is allowing businesses to design automatic and insightful customer support service. Active.ai has developed a successful, patented conversational AI platform for financial firms, insurance firms, and capital markets that can be quickly implemented. Here is more about Active.ai, the startup story, and how this startup is helping businesses take their customer support service to the next level.
In June 2021, Active.ai partnered with Talisma, which is a major customer experience solutions provider. Talisma’s technological products and solutions will be strengthened as a result of the partnership, which will allow it to incorporate a next-generation conversational AI chatbot into its platform and make it available to its BFSI clients.
On their Conversational AI journey, BFSI companies may use Talisma and Active.ai’ s solutions. Active.ai and Talisma collaborated covers a wide range of use cases in Retail and Commercial Banking, Insurance, and Capital Markets, with solutions readily available on platforms like WhatsApp, as well as a full-proof seamless fallback for human assistance if needed.
About Active.ai and How it Works?
Active.ai is a Singapore-based fintech firm focusing on artificial intelligence, with a research and development center in Bengaluru. Active.ai has developed a cutting-edge, proprietary conversational AI platform for financial institutions, insurance firms, and capital markets that can be quickly implemented.
Triniti, their artificial intelligence engine, was created to provide end-users with meaningful, intuitive engagement across many channels such as SMS, phone, and IoT devices. Triniti has been developed to empower businesses to build a deep connection with their customers. This artificial intelligence engine uses Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Natural Language Generation technologies to cater to the specific customer support needs of financial institutions, insurance companies, and capital markets.
Furthermore, this solution is backed by the knowledge and experience of an executive team with over 60 years of senior-level industry experience, as well as a thorough grasp of the strategic and operational issues that their clients are facing. Financial institutions, insurance firms, and capital markets are all moving fast to stay relevant to shifting client expectations, and Active.ai arrives just in time. The team at Active.ai sees an amazing potential whereby businesses can establish a natural dialogue and more meaningful relationships with their customers using sophisticated conversational AI.
The following are some of the major characteristics of Active.ai
For balance queries and fund transfers, pre-built processes, pre-trained datasets, and pre-certified interfaces with Finastra are available.
Business rules, bespoke replies, and branding are all highly configurable features.
APIs are available for expanding functionality.
Supports iOS, Android, Web applications, the Facebook virtual agent, and Alexa and Google Assistant capabilities.
The “ai” in Active.ai stands for Artificial Intelligence as the enterprise is a creator of an artificial intelligence platform for enterprises that aims to provide conversational banking services.
Active.ai Company’s logo
Active.ai’s tagline says, “Conversational AI built for scale”
Active.ai – Founders and History
Ravi Shankar, Shankar Narayanan Srinivasan, and Parikshit Paspulati founded Active.ai in 2016.
Founders of Active.ai
Active.ai CEO Ravi Shankar previously served at a managerial position in HDFC bank. He was the VP & Head of Non-Branch-Delivery Channels at ABN AMRO Bank N.V. From 2004 to 2009, Ravi was Group Executive Vice President at Yes Bank. He co-founded Nevales Networks Pvt Ltd., which is a cloud-based managed security service provider in 2010. In 2016, Ravi co-founded Active.ai
Active.ai COO Shankar Narayanan Srinivasan started his career as a 3D Animator and went to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded companies like Cazh Pte Ltd( an online payment company that designed applications that let users make payments without revealing credit card and bank account numbers) and Tagit Pte Ltd ( a digital solutions company). In 2012, Shankar co-founded Fastcash Pte. Ltd, a unique platform that allows users to transfer value in the form of money, airtime, gift card, or any other tokens of value, and also digital content such as photo video, etc. through social networks and messaging platforms in a secure way.
Active.ai CTO Parikshit Paspulati worked with IT companies like CSS Corp. He was the CEO of Singapore-based software company Mobilestruct Pte Ltd from 2005 to 2008. Till 2014, Parikshit worked as the CTO of digital solutions’ company Tagit Pte Ltd. He founded an IT consultancy firm Finoculus Pte. Ltd in 2014. In 2016, he co-founded Active.ai with Shankar Narayanan Srinivasan and Ravi Shankar.
The idea of starting Active.ai first hit Shankar Narayanan, when he lost his wallet during an international trip. He was calling his bank to block his credit and debit cards, but he realised that it was not easy to connect to the customer support due to busy networks, and endless IVR menus. This lead to the idea of using AI to handle customer support for a better user experience. He discussed the idea with his friends Parikshit Paspulati and Ravi Shankar, which led to the formation of Active.ai in 2016.
The initial client of Active.ai was Axis Bank, followed by CIMB Bank, Income, FWD insurance, IndusInd Bank, and Hdfc Securities. Today the startup has many clients across the globe.
Active.ai – Mission and Vision
Active.ai’s vision statement says, “Our vision is to create augmented AI services that is easier to train and evaluate. By integrating powerful data analysis tools, such as Power BI, with AI services and data sets we can easily visualize the accuracy of our models.“
Active.ai – Services and Products
With an AI product platform that can be supplied on the cloud, Active.ai created its own IP. The major goal is to solve complicated problems by connecting to banks via APIs and making information available to clients in a courteous and cost-effective manner.
The multichannel platform enables its use on messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and IoT devices such as Alexa. The startup partnered with IBM, Infosys Finacle, Microsoft, and EdgeVerve Systems to provide financial services with 24-hour support via messaging and voice interfaces.
The two main products offered by Active.ai are –
Triniti – Triniti’s AI engine combines NLP and NLG components to let financial institutions communicate with consumers in a natural way. Its purpose is to automate some tasks between clients and banks, such as transactions and customer care. Triniti-powered chatbots are used to solve inquiries, saving banks’ time, money, and labor. Triniti’s algorithms are developed such that it can interpret customer’s intent, sentiment and emotions and interact with the customers accordingly.
Morfeus – Active.ai’s middleware engine, which was created at the Bangalore Innovation Lab, operates as a Java program for a web server. It uses artificial intelligence to link front-end channels, allowing banks to communicate with their consumers through mobile, chat, or voice.
Active.ai – Business Model
Active.ai has a Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription-based business model. Active.ai’s quick growth and reputation in the banking industry has resulted in a high level of involvement and confidence among clients, ensuring a stable and secure relationship between banks and customers.
Active.ai’s top competitors are Wso2, Apigee, DigitalGenius, Yodlee, MuleSoft, Xignite, Bloomberg, Mashape, Yellow Messenger, snapLogic, Barchart, 3scale, and Thomson Reuters.
Active.ai – Challenges Faced
As more and more enterprises are adopting AI to create better customer interaction services, the industry is slowly becoming more competitive. Although the AI business is not overly saturated, it is highly specialized, making it rather difficult. It’s a multibillion-dollar sector with enormous potential.
“AI has been available for 30 years, but businesses have just lately begun to use it. Today, enterprises world over are moving away from the mobile first vision to AI first with the core focus on customer engagement and new customer experience (CX),” says Ravi Shankar, Co -founder and CEO, Active Intelligence (Active Ai) Pvt Ltd.
Active.ai is a company that has received a lot of positive comments from its customers. With SaaS subscriptions beginning at 1500 users per month, Active.ai has made this platform extremely scalable. The Active.ai team thinks that by utilizing this ground-breaking technology, any financial institution would be able to embrace Conversational AI and provide excellent customer service.
Currently, Active.ai is operating throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and India. Active.ai employs about 40 employees across Singapore, Bangalore, and the United States. In the next few years, the company’s goal is to have 100 million end-users. The company also has plans to open offices in different locations across the globe and hire talent from different locations around the world.
Active.ai – FAQs
What does Active.ai do?
Active.ai develops a successful, patented conversational AI platform for financial firms, insurance firms, and capital markets that can be quickly implemented.
Who founded Active.ai?
Ravi Shankar, a former Group Executive Vice President of Yes Bank, Shankar Narayanan, and Parikshit Paspulati founded Active.ai in 2016.
Which country is Active.ai based in?
Active Intelligence is a Singapore-based fintech firm focusing on artificial intelligence, with a research and development center in Bengaluru.
Which companies do Active.ai compete with?
Active.ai’s top competitors are Wso2, Apigee, DigitalGenius, Yodlee, MuleSoft, Xignite, Bloomberg, Mashape, Yellow Messenger, snapLogic, Barchart, 3scale, and Thomson Reuters.
How does Active.ai make money?
To generate money, Active.ai uses a Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription-based business model.
Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited is an Indian diversified financial services firm offering a range of financial products and services. The company was founded by Motilal Oswal and Raamdeo Agarwal in 1987 as a small sub-broking unit, with just 2 people running the show. The company is listed on BSE and NSE stock exchanges. The company offers loans for home, construction, composite, improvement, and extension in India
The company entered into investment banking in 2005, followed by private equity fund in 2006. The company focuses on customer-first attitude, ethical and transparent business practices, respect for professionalism, research based value investing and implementation of cutting edge technology. Which have enabled the company to blossom into an over 6000 member team. On January 2010, Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd. set up Mutual fund business named as Motilal Oswal Asset Management Company (MOAMC).
Today we are a well-diversified financial services firm offering a range of financial products and services such as Private Wealth Management, Retail Broking and Distribution, Institutional Broking, Asset Management, Investment Banking,Private Equity, Commodity Broking, Currency Broking, and Home Finance.
They have a diversified client base that includes retail customers, mutual funds, foreign institutional investors, financial institutions and corporate clients. They are headquartered in Mumbai and as of September 2020, had a network spread over 550 cities and towns comprising 2500 plus Business Locations operated by their Business Partners.
Read on to know more about the different Motilal Oswal business models and how you can work with them!
Motilal Oswal Franchise model is one of the multiple business models this full service stockbroker has to offer to potential business takers. The broker claims to have a presence in around 570 cities and 2200 plus locations across different parts of the country. Furthermore, there are around 2300 business partners associated falling in one business model or the other. It entered into the foray of franchising in the year 1999.
Motilal Oswal has a partner strength of more than 1400 through its various business models and provides services at both retail and institutional levels such as Motilal Oswal Demat Account opening Motilal Oswal offers sub broker business models through which their approach towards business partners is that of being an extension of their brand and an extension of the family. This full service stockbroker claims to provide the following benefits to its business partners:
Back office Support – Helps in Risk management and Business operation Assistance.
Stock market research and advice – helps in research reports, Advisory, strategies.
Business development opportunities – helps in onboarding assistance, mentorship programs and Technology support through an exclusive mobile app.
Technology assistance through trading products – helps in trading platforms and portfolio tools.
You can be a Motilal Oswal business partner in the following ways:
Franchise
Individual or businesses that are looking to expand their financial footprint can opt for the Motilal Oswal franchise model. You need to have a requisite office space along with a small team that can handled day to day operations. Entrepreneurs who think they have a dream to grow big and have the passion and the capability to pursue the journey towards their dream. With all the initial expenses taken care of, you get a revenue sharing of 60% of the brokerage generate by them.
The eligibility for this model are good and consistent reputation in the financial space, a refundable deposit of INR 3 lakh to be made to the full service stockbroker and an experience of 2 to 3 years in the streams of broker or sub broker. They must also have a minimum investment of INR 5 lakh to INR 10 lakh at the onset with reasonable wallet for infrastructure related expenses and an area of 150 to 200 sq. ft. to set up an office in a year.
Benefits of joining Motilal Oswal are:
Comprehensive Business development Initiatives.
Strong Mentorship form Senior Management.
Robust Back Office and Operations Support.
Solid Research and Solid Advice.
How Motilal Oswal will build your business:
Superior Technology Platform for Multiple Products.
Dedicated Onboarding and Engagement Services.
Time tested and proven New client Acquisition strategies.
Full proof client shifting/business migration process.
Employee to Entrepreneur
This program is specifically for people who are either an employee at a stockbroking house or have a reasonable experience in the stock market. The eligibility criteria for this business model is that you must either be an employee of any stockbroking company or must be direct stockbroking experience. It’s for those who want to start their own business. Even in this model you get to keep a specific percentage of the overall revenue generated through your addition to the program. This percentage can range from 30% to 40% of the overall revenue.
The benefits under this model are:
No limits to your career growth.
Opportunity to create a legacy for your future generations.
Extend your working life with your own business.
Customize your business according to your area of expertise.
How Motilal Oswal can help in the employee to entrepreneurs sector:
Get insights from our entrepreneurial experience of growing a broking business.
Get a product suite to fulfill every need of your client.
Get access to our famed Solid Research and Advice.
Get readymade Back Office Infrastructure and Risk Management Systems.
Remisier
This business model of Motilal Oswal does not require any upfront capital expenditure to set up the business. An individual looking to spend nothing on the office infrastructure cost may try out this business model. The idea is simple, they provide interested business leads to Motilal Oswal and brokerage generated from the converted clients will have a share for the remisier. However the broker claims that it will provide all kinds of tools, research and other related assistance for client/lead acquisition.
The eligible criteria for setting up a remisier business model with Motilal Oswal are reasonable reputation and hold of potential client base in the financial space, sales experience of at least 2 to 3 years of financial products, an operational expense capacity of INR 1 lakh. Entrepreneurs wanting to set up their business at no capital cost and largely work independently.
The benefits of this model are:
Build your business with minimal costs.
Complete infrastructure support available.
No initial set up costs. Robust advisory support.
Dealing support at branches.
How Motilal Oswal can help set up their business:
Zero Infrastructure and support costs.
Superior Technology Platform for multiple products.
Support at local branches for dealing.
Support for new client acquisition.
Motilal Oswal Products and Services
Channel Partner
This business model of Motilal Oswal channel partner is more of a collaboration with the broker rather than working under the broker. In case you are already working with a specific set of clients for stock market trading, then you may choose to opt for this business model. The idea, in this case is to offer the existing client base of yours with other potential investment opportunities apart from the ones they are already into.
The eligibility criteria in case of a channel partner program is an active set of clients trading or investing in the stock market. Since channel partners are going to bring investor base to the full service broker, they get better revenue sharing on new investment products sold (which is anything from 50% to 60%). Those who would like to collaborate with us to cater to a wider range of clients and partake in the revenue pie of the complete financial intermedia on opportunity.
Benefits of being Motilal Oswal channel partner:
Comprehensive business development initiatives.
Strong mentorship from senior management.
Robust back-office and operations support.
Solid research, advice and advisory products.
How Motilal Oswal help build your business:
Superior technology platform for multiple products.
Dedicated customer acquisition and Engagement Services.
Staffing & training support.
Multiple Assets – one stop shop for your clients.
Digi Partner
It is a unique partnership model where you’re end to end business right from acquiring clients, account opening, business operations, product suggestions, advisory product Investments, and moderation is done digitally. As the name suggests, Digi-Partner is a unique partnership model where you’re End to end business right from acquiring clients, account opening, business operations, product suggestions, advisory product Investments and moderation is done digitally.
Benefits of joining Motilal Oswal Digi Partner:
No compulsion of office infrastructure.
Online Funds & Securities pay-in and pay-out facility.
Call-N-Trade dealing service support.
Easy client account opening plus lucrative brokerage.
How the company can help you build your business:
Extended business development support.
Dedicated reactivation desk.
Technology support with Uppermost.
Multiple asset classes to cross sell.
Motilal Oswal – FAQs
What is Motilal Oswal Sub Broker Commission?
Taking into account the entitlements, precisely in terms of the revenue, there is a higher ratio of revenue that you will retain. There is a flexible revenue sharing provided by the stockbroking house, where 60% – 80% is provided to the sub-broker.
Which is the cheapest brokerage in India?
5Paisa is a part of IIFL (India Infoline) and offers the cheapest stock brokerage in India. IIFL launched 5Paisa to offer a lower brokerage platform for its clients and to compete with the fast-growing discount broking industry.
What is the lowest brokerage charges in India?
The minimum brokerage charge by the full-service brokers is the minimum commission they charge for trading with them. With a brokerage of 0.50%, if the total trade value is less than INR 7000, you will pay the minimum brokerage amount of INR 35.
Which broker is best in India?
Zerodha is one of the best brokers in India.
Who owns Motilal Oswal?
Passionate Investment Management Private Limited is the parent organisation of Motilal Oswal.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved byKredX.
Invoice Discounting, also known as Invoice Bill Discounting, is a method for a business to get working profits by issuing an invoice to a lender at a lower price than that mentioned on the bill. In this setup, the seller obtains the payments well ahead of the bill’s due date and can put the money to good use in his enterprise.
KredX, headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka, is a web-based invoice discounting tool that allows businesses to fundraise for their operating expenses.
As of December 2019, KredX, an invoice discounting platform, has raised $26 million (nearly INR 184 crore) in Series-B fundraising led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous investors. In 2016, Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners invested INR 40 crore in the company’s Series-A investment. The Bengaluru-based venture assists businesses with short-term financing needs by paying bills and receivables.
According to the company’s most recent data, KredX has handled over 500,000 invoices, assisting more than 5,000 suppliers through 10,000 investors in 36 locations around the country. Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global, remarked, “I believe the firm (KredX) has developed an efficient and reliable loan marketplace connecting Indian companies with institutional investors.”
About KredX and How it Works?
KredX is a company that creates an invoice-discounting platform that allows businesses to grow without having to worry about collateral. The business’s platform provides an investing software that connects micro, small, and medium-sized businesses seeking working capital with individual lenders, allowing firms to obtain working money quickly by selling outstanding receivables.
KredX is a platform where company owners can sell invoices raised on large cap firms and investors can buy them. By purchasing these future income flows, investors wishing to invest money for a short period of time (1-3 months) can earn substantial returns. It creates a whole new financial asset class by combining advanced software with credit underwriting and data and analytics expertise. This platform allows business owners searching for a cash advance on invoices raised against big-name institutions to sell these outstanding bills at attractive rates.
KredX assisted the business in managing its finances while maintaining that its client relationships were not jeopardized. They were able to grow and develop their business by partnering with KredX, raising liquidity without affecting the balance sheet. KredX’ s customized methods and structured solutions assisted the organization in effectively allocating resources for its expansion needs.
KredX – Mission and Vision
KredX was founded in 2015 with the sole purpose of assisting businesses with their working capital needs by leveraging an asset that sits dormant on their balance sheet in the form of accounts receivable.
KredX – Name, Logo and Tagline
KredX’ s Company Logo
KredX believes in improving people’s lives through its intuitive and innovative products, and its work culture reflects this belief. The team is dedicated to achieving the “all work and must-play” aim.
KredX – Founder and History
Anurag Jain is the Founder and Executive Director of KredX. KredX was founded in 2015 with the sole purpose of assisting businesses in overcoming cash flow difficulties and hence boosting growth.
The KredX range of products grew from an invoice discount platform to handle greater concerns including early payments for corporate treasuries through Early Payments Technology and Growth Capital solutions. At present, KredX is India’s biggest cash flow solution provider, providing unique capital solutions to businesses and their suppliers while also providing investors with a unique opportunity to make low-risk, high-return investments.
With just INR 2 lakh in the capital, the company that began with the goal of providing cost-effective goods and solutions in all areas of IT has developed into a professionally run supply-chain specialist with a revenue of INR 3400 crore.
On a daily basis, the company’s unshakable devotion to customer experience, irrepressible desire for excellence, seamless coordination among team members, and solid business ethics lead to a large and diverse clientele. The payment cycle can be pushed out across a few weeks in such instances. Dealing with major vendors whose payment timeframes may fluctuate, ultimately influencing their finances, is important to any company’s business growth.
KredX – Products and Services
The KredX Product Suite is a collection of following KredX products:
Working Cash Solution – Enabling businesses to obtain working capital in a short period of time while also giving investors with a lucrative return on their investment.
Growth Capital Solution – KredX’ s growth capital solutions assist firms in overcoming obstacles by offering upfront funding for expansion and growth.
Early Payments Technology — A cloud-based technology solution that allows businesses to make discounted early payments to their vendors.
KredX is a digital invoice discounting platform that allows businesses to acquire funds for working capital needs at advantageous terms by selling outstanding bills raised against blue-chip firms, while also giving investors a unique short-term investment opportunity.
The KredX business model is an alternative investment model in which you can begin investing with a minimum of 3 Lacs for a short period of time and expect a fixed return at the end of the investment period, which can range from 30 to 90 days. Annual returns range from 12 percent to 20 percent (as per their marketing material).
KredX – Revenue And Growth
At present, KredX’ s revenue is $31 Million. Through its network of lenders, digital lender KredX said it will disburse INR 1,000 crore in loans in the fiscal year 2021 through its revenue-based financing (RBF) product, with an emphasis on consumer brands and software-as-a-service (SaaS) firms.
Through its revenue-based financing product, KredX has disbursed loans to a number of brands trying to sell on e-commerce platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, and Myntra in the last two years.
KredX – Funding and Investors
Date
Round
Amount
Lead Investors
Dec 11, 2019
Series B
$26M
Tiger Global Management
Oct 25, 2016
Series A
$6.3M
Sequoia Capital India
Apr 13, 2016
Seed Round
$750K
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KredX – Acquisitions
Acquiree Name
About Acquiree
Date
Amount
Hummingbill
Hummingbill is a B2B invoice platform that helps vendors and enterprises run more efficiently, using email plugins.
The organisation tried a variety of financial aid options in search of solutions to meet their needs, but there were a number of issues with the options, the most significant of which was the time needed in the process. There are various issues with the offerings, the most significant of which is the amount of time required to complete the process. Other disadvantages included:
Reduced the funding limit in accordance with existing policies and procedures.
To access standard offerings, the organization had to provide collateral and financial information.
Other types of short- and long-term financing were prohibitively expensive.
Obtaining capital for liquidity and expansion is a challenge.
KredX – Future Plans
“Being in the B2B payment ecosystem, our transaction processing volume has crossed $2.4 billion annually and is forecast to double in the next twelve months. With wider acceptance of our products, we are well-positioned to serve the entire spectrum of the supply chain for any company,” said Anurag Jain, executive director, KredX.
More than 120 companies use the platform, including Tata Croma, Future Group, and Vedanta. The company intends to use the additional funds to hire senior executives in order to accelerate its expansion. It also plans to use the capital to develop new products and make acquisitions.
According to the company’s data, KredX has handled over 500,000 invoices, assisting more than 5,000 suppliers through 10,000 investors in 36 locations around the country.
” I believe the company (KredX) has created an efficient and trusted lending marketplace connecting Indian companies with institutional investors,” said Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global.
Mahenoor Mansuri
