Softbank-backed Indian payments startup  expands on back of Indian outbound market

Nakul Kothari: “We believe the future is real time payments from account to account, and that will be the driving force of the digital economy.”

The need for payments orchestration will become more and more acute in South-east Asia as fragmentation in payments grows with every country wanting to develop their own payment gateways and methods, observed Nakul Kothari of the Softbank-backed Indian payments startup, Juspay.

Kothari, who’s head of market expansion, South-east Asia and Middle East, added that this was particularly true in the travel industry which covers multiple geographies, faces cross-border payment challenges and needs to offer multiple, local payment methods, for a seamless digital experience.

Recognising the opportunity for travel outside India, on the back of a growing Indian outbound travel market, Bengaluru-based Juspay is pursuing an aggressive expansion plan to bring its payments tech solutions outside India.

“Travel is big for us in India. We power leading travel brands in India including Asia’s largest airline. We saw our Indian merchants growing outside India, and we were processing their payments, and we thought this is a good opportunity for us to follow,” said Kothari.

It has opened an office in Singapore, with Dublin and San Francisco to be opened shortly.

Kothari, who’s spearheading the expansion in South-east Asia and the Middle East, said the company has signed with one of the largest online travel platforms in South-east Asia – which he declined to disclose – that went live in February this year.

He said it has also signed deals with online travel aggregators and experience booking platforms in South-east Asia and Middle East, and is pursuing talks with major airlines in Asia as well.

“We are onboarding merchants across the globe and bringing our payments technology solutions to all merchants accepting payments in E-commerce and travel to solve end-to-end Payment problems. We have built multiple custom features for travel, and have integrated with back-end providers such as Amadeus, to solve cross-border challenges.”

He added that merchants typically face high charges as well as low transparency. “With Payment Orchestration, we can reduce overall transaction charges, improve conversion rates and solve transparency issues.”

He explained, “The power of Juspay comes in when the landscape gets diverse, with multiple digital wallets, local payment gateways, and payment orchestration is needed for the merchants to navigate the diversity.

“We are not a digital wallet provider, not a payment gateway, we are a tech solution that enables merchants to accept any payments – PromptPay, PayNow, Grab, Alipay, Doquo – with just one integration, and we are also a tech partner for banks on acquiring and issuing side.

“We are the unifying layer to help merchants go live with any payment gateway, and to enable any payment instrument across any country, at a fraction of the cost. The charge to the merchant is very nominal, depending on the product and features.”

Juspay processes more than 125m transactions per day, and its annualized TPV exceeds $500 billion. Describing itself as “the biggest payments orchestration platform in India”, Kothari said Juspay captures more than 90% of orchestration volume across industries. “Every three out of top five merchants in any sector use Juspay to power their payments,” said Kothari, who joined the company five years ago, from American Express.

Juspay, founded in 2012, received a funding round of $60 million, led by SoftBank Vision Fund II. The round, which brought total funding raised in the company to about $87 million, valued Juspay at $460 million. At the time, founder Vimal Kumar said that Juspay would invest the money in technology and product development to scale its business in payment and related products like credit – both in India and globally. “We will need to hire more people and train them for this expansion. We have around 600 people and should get to 1,000 next year,” he told the Economic Times, at the time.

In Singapore, it has taken on a team of five, said Kothari.

He noted that Juspay, being a pioneer in the rollout of the Real Time Payment Systems (UPI -Unified Payments Interface) in India, took two lessons from the exercise – one, the need for reliability and two, the need for a good payment experience.

“At the scale at which UPI operates, even if spikes reach 25,000 transactions per second, our system is up and running all the time – the most important need is to have a Scalable, reliable layer of payments connected to all the PSPs all the time.

“As for the payment experience, it is a bit broken now, in places such as Indonesia, and we are partnering with banks to improve the experience.”

He concluded, “We believe the future is real time payments from account to account, and that will be the driving force of the digital economy.”