Founded in 2014,
Telr is a leading payment gateway offering a set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enable businesses to accept and manage online payments via web, mobile and social media. It has a strong anti-fraud platform that facilitates high success rates of transactions for SME online sellers without compromising security. It provides additional services of a store builder and merchant cash advance to help high growth to scale their businesses faster. The company has recently launched its services in India. It is present in UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its headquarters in Singapore. It has also licensed its in-house technology to a large Telkom group in Indonesia.
BWDisrupt team member Sujata Sangwan Interacts with Sirish Kumar, Founder & CEO, Telr and Spoke to Him
How does Telr work? Telr vision is to provide an ecosystem for online SMEs in emerging markets, to accept payments online on social media, mobile app and websites, with strong proprietary anti-fraud and risk management solutions and to access short term loans to fund their business growth. To elaborate, it is a leading payment gateway offering a set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enable businesses to accept and manage online payments via web, mobile and social media. Whilst providing the most secure, reliable and innovative online payment processing service, Telr has a strong anti-fraud platform, facilitating high success rates of transactions for SME online sellers without compromising security. This helps increase revenues for the merchants Furthermore, as Telr owns the full stack technology, it offers technology licensing and consulting services to corporates. Such corporates are able to provide the value added services of online payments to their clients, hence making their relationships with their clients more sticky.
Headquartered in Singapore, Telr is present in UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has recently launched its services in India. It has also licensed its in-house technology to a large telco group in Indonesia. This will allow the merchants or online sellers to offer omni-channel payments experience to its buyers by paying cash in more than 15,000 cash collection points. In India, we have launched the merchant self-onboarding solution. This will enable fast and seamless integration for India’s large and growing online merchant base. It will further boost the business of these merchants through our rich, secure payments gateway as well as value-added services.
Telr offers online payments solutions for merchants using websites as well as social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram and mobile apps. Moreover, we assist emerging entrepreneurs with the tools required to kick-start, grow and analyze their online businesses, providing swift, seamless web store solutions in order to move the offline retailers onto the online medium.
What inspired you to start this business?I have seen entrepreneurs in emerging markets struggle to offer their customers to pay online. The ecosystem in India and emerging markets is yet to develop to include all buyers and sellers to transact online. The sellers need to create an online identity through a website, social media presence etc. As their businesses grow, they need to unlock their working capital and avail short term funding. There is an urgent need to make the ecosystem less fragmented where sellers, banks, logistics players and e-commerce enablers partner with each other. Following the steps taken by the current Indian government for the startup economy, we have the right environment to initiate and promote entrepreneurial ventures and small and medium sized enterprises. With Telr, we primarily wanted to leverage the opportunity and from the very scratch, have endeavored to create a local payment ecosystem that would enable and empower the local entrepreneurs. E-payments industry will witness entry of more players as there are very limited number of existing players that have to serve a growing pie.
What are the special key features of your company? How are you different from the existing ones?The most vital factor that differentiates Telr from its contemporaries is its fresh, dynamic and progressive approach and its focus on the SME and start-up industry and continuously working on improving the processes with banking partners. It reduces the on-boarding time by over 50% by advising on the specific documentation based on company type and ownership structure and allowing electronic uploading of the same.
Furthermore, Telr seeks to eliminate the fragmentation that exists between key stakeholders in the e-commerce markets such as merchants, logistics services, web store providers and banks. The business model endeavors to facilitate seamless and smooth business growth of Telr SME clients.
We have also partnered with several banks and automated the processes to help merchants transition online and also provide technical support in automating processes at a transactional level. With our own proprietary risk management platform, we provide extensive security to SME accepting payments online, investigating each and every transaction.
How much funding Telr raised till now? We have secured institutional investment from Singapore and Middle East. That helped us in attracting talent, building a scalable infrastructure. It helps Telr to offer customize solutions to SME depending upon their business type, automating on-boarding of merchants, providing proprietary risk management and anti-fraud solutions to SMEs.
In future, we have plans of securing investment from strategic investors in India, which will help Telr support large untapped segments such as hotels, education, home services.
How do you monetize? Telr has different models depending upon the type of services offering, the business segment and the market it operates. It earns service fees over a period of time or earns share of transactions processed for its business clients or earns share from revenue earned by its various partners.
What were the challenges your startup faced while setting up the business?It is important to continuously look at expanding distribution of our services and then overcome the challenge of delivering through the newly opened distribution channels. As has been reiterated by many successful entrepreneurs such as Azim Premji, it is important to prioritize due to scarce resources and continuously sharpen the path to scalability. The challenges have to be converted into an opportunity.
What is the market size and market opportunity?The shift towards cashless economy has been perceived at a global level and perhaps that would define the scope and opportunities for the business like ours. For now, we are focused at emerging markets, notably India, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Our target market in India alone is expected to reach 45 billion dollars by 2020.
Furthermore, our integrated transaction model, combining both the online and offline transactions further enhances the scope for the business, taking it to a 1 trillion dollar market in the next 4-5 years.
Lastly, we continuously look for partnerships, helping SMEs secure funds for short tenor. By 2020 we expect to see at least 1,000,000 SME accepting payments online in India.
What are the traction details? Our customers are business clients accepting payments online. We are not focused on acquiring individual users and buyers. We have grown more than 200 percent year on year, are opening new revenue streams and expanding in different countries. With this growth, we have a clear path to reaching positive cash flow and become self -sustaining.
What advice you want to share with the new entrants in this space?Focus on disruption. The startups emerging out presently are beginning to look and sound exactly the same. I would urge the new entrants to innovate and disrupt the existing spaces, whilst maintaining a compelling story of their brand. Customer support and response time to queries to customers is key to cost effective scalability.
Any interesting quote about your venture...Telr is for tailor made solutions to its online customers!
