RazorPay is an online payment gateway that allows merchants to collect payments through credit/debit card, net banking, or wallets such as MobiKwik, Freecharge, PayU and the like.

In 2013, when RazorPay made an entry into the online payments space, it was up against a regulatory battle even US-based PayPal couldn’t tackle; the mandate that customers cannot earn more than US $500 per allowance, and he/she should transfer the cash (from the wallet) to an Indian bank within seven days of receiving the payment.

Today, beating this and more odds, this Indian startup has made significant strides by working around every challenge, and setting up a platform which, in the last five months, has signed up 600 merchants and recorded a 50 per cent growth in transfer, month-on-month.

We usually verify the authenticity and credibility of merchants by avoiding physical paperwork and instead doing a background check with the help of their PAN card, Aadhar Card or other government certificates.

The Merchant Connect

Founded by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, RazorPay is an online payment gateway that allows merchants to collect payments through credit/debit card, net banking, or wallets such as MobiKwik, Freecharge, PayU and the like. While earlier, merchants had to enter two lines of code to integrate payments, within a day, on their platform, the process has now been reduced to less than an hour. “We usually verify the authenticity and credibility of merchants by avoiding physical paperwork and instead of doing a background check with the help of their PAN card, Aadhar Card or other government certificates,” explains Mathur.

Since its prototype stage, the company has built in several features into its product; such as cross platform payment form that can be embedded using single line of javascript, a payments dashboard for merchants, auto-updation of new and improved features, auto filling OTP with Android SDK and more. “In fact, our mobile software has been built in a way that it works even on 2G speeds,” adds Mathur.

The Need of the Hour

In the second half of 2016, the startup has capitalised on several opportunities to introduce new features to further grow its business; key among them being, the demonetisation move by the Central Government and the adoption of UPI (Unified Payments Interface). For example, its eCOD feature replaces Cash on Delivery by helping ecommerce companies accept payments other than cash, such as UPI or digital wallets, during time of delivery. The feature has been designed in a way that the payment mechanism will generate a PIN number without Internet connectivity or wallet login, which the customer receives at the time of delivery, making the process as simple as paying cash.  “We’ve also launched a mobile app for integrating payments and it has recorded 10,000 downloads so far,” he adds.

A Growth Chart

In the last decade, while the goal of fintech startups in the payments space has been on bill payments and the sales process, Mathur believes that the focus has now shifted to tech gaining an edge over everything else. “That’s why we don’t have a big sales team. Instead, we focus on building a great product team, and carving our niche on the technology front,” he shares.

Believing that the secret to the company’s success lies in technology and lending a close ear to customer feedback, Mathur is clear that in the coming year, his goal remains to continue to grow the monthly transaction rate by 50 per cent, and hopefully become a market leader in the next two to three years.

Snapshot

Founders: Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar

Year: 2013

Concept: Similar to US-based Stripe, an online Indian payment gateway platform for Indian merchants

Investors: Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Tiger Global, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal (Snapdeal), Punit Soni (former Chief Product Officer at Flipkart), Amit Gupta and Naveen Tewari (InMobi) and more.