We are innovating technology to provide a seamless payment experience: Shailaz Nag
We are innovating technology to provide a seamless payment experience: Shailaz Nag

With consumerism aggressively drifting towards the online buying and selling, a proper online payment gateway in place is very necessary for every online merchant. The payment industry in the country is predicted to witness multi-fold growth in the coming future.

But with payments going digital, people now-a-days expect more from these solution providers. The industry is still at a point of inflexion, with consumer behaviour, government regulations etc but its changing rapidly. With technologies like m-wallet, m-banking, m-POS NFC etc. mobile payments have really transformed the traditional money transaction model.

Talking about the same with Retailer Media, Shailaz Nag, COO & Co-founder, PayU Biz share some exclusive insights on the future of mobile payments in the country and how PayU Biz plans to accumulate a largest digital payment ecosystem in the country.

Please share your background. Your education and whether entrepreneurship was something you always wanted to do?
I have always had a natural inclination towards finance as a subject. This love for numbers led me to be a CA rankholder, and after that holding various senior positions of finance at companies such as Yahoo, Airtel &Goibibo. I later co-founded PayU India, which is a Naspers Group Company.

I have experience of over 12 years which spans the Telecom, Internet and Payments industry with reputed brands. I have headed business intelligence for Airtel in India and helped Yahoo to set up its search engine operations in India as Yahoo India’s director of finance. Prior to setting up PayU, I have worked with Ibibo group as Head of finance. I hold an MBA degree, CA and have attended executive management program at Harvard Business School.

It is actually my love for numbers that showed me the way to entrepreneurship. While working at Goibibo, the idea of PayU came into being and I knew that business of payments is something I would want to dive into.

How was the idea of your Start-up conceptualized? What is the need you are addressing in the market?
We started working in the business of payments when it was still an unexplored territory in India. In every internet economy, first thing to take off is classifieds; second is travel; and the third is e-commerce. And they all need one common proposition which is a payment aggregator. The true sense of online business is when users are able to pay online. And we enabled users to pay online by integrating our technology with all the merchants so that they can collect online payments. We addressed the need of secure, fast and trustworthy payment aggregator that allow merchants to collect payments online.

The first business vertical we launched was PayUbiz, which was an enterprise grade payment solution. Starting from transactions of 400 Cr. a year, we are set to achieve the target of 25,000 Cr. by the end of this fiscal year.

We also understood and addressed the problems faced by small merchants and envisioned PayUmoney, which enabled small merchants to go online at very minimal cost and time. The product saw amazing adoption and more than 150,000 merchants uses PayUmoney today, whereas the entire enterprise market is not of more than 20,000 merchants.

Talk to us about your latest technology features and the responses so far?
The recently launched ‘One Tap’ by PayUbiz is one such technological breakthrough which sent ripples across the online payments industry. The patent pending and first-of-its-kind tech innovation in the payments world is another step which will ensure a robust online payment system. The PCI-DSS complaint and patent pending ‘One Tap technology’ is a combination of four different technological innovations by us that together provide a seamless online payments experience to the users.

Store Card Vault: This feature is the first of seamless payment journey, ensures that the consumers don’t have to go through the pain of putting in the 16-digit card number repeatedly.

No CVV: The heart of creating a seamless one tap payment solution was doing away with the process of repeatedly entering the CVV. The innovative patent pending and PCC-DSS certified technology developed by PayUbiz provided a solution to it.

Auto OTP Generation: Furthermore, the second factor authentication of OTP, gets auto-read and submitted leading to the completion of a seamless one tap payment experience.

Magic Retry: The magic continues even when there is a network issue and the magic retry feature picks up the transaction from the point where it stopped.

We have received amazing response from our partner merchants for this technology. Merchants like Peppertp, GoIbibo, Redbus, Twigly& PayUmoney are already using technology and have received positive testimonials from their users regarding this technology. We aim to present this technology on every mobile screen by partnering with as many merchants as possible.

What is your Business Model? Please share numbers of founders, Product/services offered and current Business size.
PayU operates two business vertcials in India: PayUbiz& PayUmoney. PayUbiz is a B2B business vertical catering to enterprise grade merchants. It is a leading payment gateway solution provider used by more than 80 out of the top 100 e-commerce companies. PayUmoney is a FREE and unique online payments solution for anyone who wants to collect payments in India. PayUmoney is being used by more than 1,50,000 SMBs today.

PayUbiz charges one time set up fees and TDR (transaction deduction rate) which ranges from .75% to upto 2.95% per transaction. There is absolutely no Setup fee or AMC levied with PayUmoney. The only charge borne by merchant is the TDR%.

We are two founders, Nitin Gupta & I. Nitin works in the role of CEO where he is responsible for developing strategy, product & platform. I work as COO and am responsible for operations, finance and building a true start-up culture in the company.

We started from transactions of 400 Cr. a year in 2012 and are set to achieve the target of 25,000 Cr. by the end of this fiscal year.

Who is your target consumer? Could you please share how you have detailed your consumer?
We have specific target consumer for both our business verticals: PayUbiz & PayUmoney. For PayUbiz, our consumers are largest e-commerce merchants like Snapdeal, Jabong, Myntra, Yatra, Bookmyshow etc.

For PayUmoney are target consumer is anyone and everyone who wants to collect online payments.

Have you raised any funding so far? What are your plans to use this funding for?
We are promoted by Naspers Group, which is a broad-based multinational internet and media group, offering services in more than 130 countries. The group definitely has deep pockets, but being a promoter backed company we don’t believe in flaunting the funding.

What was it that attracted the Investors to your business? Have you had to pivot your business in anyways that has worked for you?
While e-commerce industry was booming in the country, we knew that payments will be the next big thing. And this is because of the simple reason that to facilitate e-commerce, payments play the role. Our promoters knew from their experience in different markets of the world that technology used in payment processing is a key ingredient for the success of e-commerce. At PayU, we have built this technology to provide seamless payment experience on every e-commerce website that uses us.

While working on PayUbiz, we calculated that the total size of merchants who sell online is almost 13,000. Out of which 11,000 were already using PayUbiz. Our research also shows us that there are 51 million SMBs in India which if given option would be willing to sell their products online. However, the SMB industry was faced with challenges like cost of setting up a website, collecting payments, integration etc. This is when we launched PayUmoney SMB and gave seven tools for free. We helped SMBs to go online in just 24 hours with no set up fee and easy documentation process. Now, there are 1,50,000 SMBs which collect online payments using PayUmoney.

What is your team size? What is your office culture like? 
We are now 700 people strong. We follow 6 PayU ways: Be fast, Be open, Be innovative, Be empowered, Use Integrity. We have no cabin culture with atmosphere of open communication.

We offer freedom to employees to manage their time & productivity, to personalize their working space and implement their own ideas. We also help to establish as leader by various training and development programs.

What has been your A-ha Moment in the business? (The high point)
Launch of OneTap technology by PayUbiz is one such moment. We have even filed a patent for this technology which is a combination of four different tech innovations by us.

How do you see growth scenario is this business? What are your future scale-up plans?
We started from transactions of 400 Cr. a year in 2012 and are set to achieve the target of 25,000 Cr. by the end of this fiscal year.

To scale further, we are enabling more SMBs to collect online payments. We are innovating our technology to provide seamless experience to our users. We are also introducing lot of innovations for mobile payments such as Auto-OTP read feature, magic retry etc. 

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