“We thought it was a good idea to acquire Raghu’s company, both from people and business standpoint.”

In FY 2011, the company’s annual revenue stood at Rs. 110 crore. Given the higher demand for ATMs and PoS, Antony expects this number to triple this fiscal. Additionally, it is exploring inorganic growth and plans to enter other emerging markets outside of India.

The early days

Prizm was started about four years ago through the acquisition of Integrated Maintenance and Services Pvt Ltd (IMAS), an ATM maintenance company founded by Raghu Nathan, who is currently the director of services delivery at the company. It raised over US $7 million from Sequoia Capital to fund the initial stages and the acquisition. Antony says, “We thought it was a good idea to acquire Raghu’s company, both from people and business standpoint.” IMAS’ expertise in ATM maintenance helped Prizm expand into other service areas within electronic payment transactions and get into deployment and payment processing.

Prizm’s co-founders, Shyam Sunder, Jayant D’Mello and Srinivas Rao, had worked with Antony in a couple of his earlier ventures. The team knew execution was crucial to make this venture work and prior experience in the payment processing and ATM space helped. From setting up ATM manufacturing facilities to building relationships with banks, the founding team complimented each other.

No reinventions

Right from the early years, Prizm knew its focus would be on delivering and offering services to banks. “Around the world, hardware and software technology used in this industry was getting better. It made sense to partner with technology providers and bring in our execution skills in offering services rather than reinventing the wheel,” explains Antony.

The company today partners with global corporations like Diebol and NCR to Indian companies like Vortex Engineering to source the technology used in ATMs. On the software front, it partners with S1, the global leader in payment processing and Cogent Systems (a subsidiary of U.S.-based 3M Company) that offers security solutions. In short, Prizm serves as a one-point vendor for banks, and in turn, works with various suppliers to deliver its service. For security services and secure logistics, it partners with companies like G4S and vendors like Brink’s respectively.

“Around the world, hardware and software technology used in this industry were getting better. It made sense to partner with technology providers and bring in our execution skills in offering services rather than reinventing the wheel.”

“It’s important for us to receive continued support from regulators,” says Antony. On the regulatory front, it has been fairly positive for the sector as a whole. ATMs were de-licensed, which meant one didn’t need a license to deploy individual ATMs. The government made ATMs inter-operable, which meant there are no fees for using debit cards on other bank ATMs. The government has also put together a framework for mobile payments and pre-paid cards, which opens up more growth prospects for the company as it enters other areas within the payment services domain.

Going forward

For Prizm, the next steps are entry into newer markets and new service areas including pre-paid cards and mobile payment processing. The company is also exploring the possibility of managing online payments for clients; especially for those merchants it manages PoS terminals. “We could potentially become a one-stop shop for all payment processing needs,” says Antony.

WHAT NEXT FOR PRIZM?

• Deploy over 500 ATMs per month in India
• Enter emerging markets globally
• Inorganic growth, especially in the areas of mobile payment processing and cash cards
• Build tremendous scale in the payments processing space in India