Paydeck Next Step is to Launch Its App in the First Quarter of 2017

BWDisrupt interacted with the core team of Paydeck, a Kolkata-based Fintech startup that has been operational from the past 8 months and has achieved reasonable and sustainable growth.

Excerpts from the interview with  Saurabh Suman, CEO and Founder, Paydeck.

Tell us about how your startup came to being? What is the idea behind it?

It started with the real problem: Why I can’t pay my rent/society maintenance with credit card?
Paydeck was born when I was going through bad financial crisis and wanted to pay my house rent and CAM charges with credit card. And I didn't get a single option to do so in India. With this frustration & pain firsthand inspired me to create a solution that would enable anyone to use their card of choice for any payment, regardless of acceptance & without optional recipient participation.

One of the greatest innovations of the 20th Century, in payments space, was the advent of cards – credit and debit. The ease with which the cards fit into your wallet and significantly reduce the need to carry large sums of cash on you at all times, has left the consumers mesmerized. Across the globe, acceptability of cards has increased at a scorching pace and in the Western World more than 50% of all consumer payments are made using cards (credit cards mainly).

However, in India, while the trend is clearly on the rise, the overall penetration is much lower at <5%. This is on account of two reasons: societal preference for use of cash and paucity of POS terminals in the country – of the 1 crore retailers in the country only about 6 lac retailers allow the use of cards to make a payment.

The second factor leaves us, Indians, with the need to keep carrying cash in our wallets/purses and feeds into our preference for using cash.

With this background in mind and to help the Indian society to truly unleash the power of cards, PayDeck was founded. The idea is simple – use the two items most commonly found on a significant majority of Indian viz. the Mobile Phone and the Bank Card (debit/credit) to enable users to make a variety of payments quickly, conveniently and ‘on the go’.

In a different way of understanding:

We started Paydeck out of the real Pain of a common man, who has a credit card in his pocket and with which they actually wanted to pay for certain things, where POS machines were not available. Thus we created Paydeck, The Digital Pos. Using Paydeck you can use the credit card to make the payment for numerous things, which falls under the category of Service or goods selling. And thus enabling credit card holder to utilise the credit limit at their disposal.

Apart of this, we have the invoice solution, where you can send an invoice to a person who is availing the services you are providing and you don’t have a way to carry a pos machine every time to the Payer. You can send the invoice & the Payer shall be able to use their Debit Card or Credit Card to pay for those invoices. The sectors which we have seen high momentum coming from is Event Planners, Wedding Planners, Interior Designers, Building Contract Suppliers, Professional Photographers, Dealer/Distributors of automobile parts, etc. We call it SOHO Module! Small Office/Home Office Merchants. Thus catering mainly to the un-organized

What are the products and services you offer?

Paydeck solves a very simple problem of moving money in a quick, convenient and secure way while empowering people to pay for any good or service on a credit card, regardless of acceptance.

Paydeck (‘pay-deck') makes payments possible, but we are not about payments. We are about “payers” - the people behind the payment. A new, exciting option to pay for anything and everything 'big' in life - convenient, a la carte, fun, rewarding, and secure.

Paydeck is solving a problem we don’t always realize we have – limitations on when we can use our card of choice – because we’re so used to being told ‘no cards accepted’ within certain industries.

Who are the merchants?

Your landlord who is providing you a accommodation & he/she has to pay taxes on earning that money.

Your child's tuition teacher, who don’t have a swiping machine, but he/she could be paid with credit card & he/she pays taxes on that earning.

Merchants at paydeck are those who are professionals or businesses providing services or selling goods from their home or office & have no credit card swiping machine nor they want to have because of handling hassle or related fees.

Type of merchants or places where you can use your credit card to pay:
Rental – Home or office, Tuition – Teacher or coaching institute, Interior designer, wedding planner, photographer, home chef, vendors/dealers & distributors, Car service centers- where you send your car for service & pay at your home in cash or cheque, and many other options.

What is the existing business and revenue model you are following?

Currently we are looking at approx 20%+ month on month growth! We are charging 2.5% flat inclusive of all on per trxn basis!

What is your Startups's funding status?

We are bootstrapped! And we would like to remain the same for sometime for now.

With Said that, We surely are looking for investment too, but not from everyone. People who are in sync with idea & can actually do some value additions.

We have recently received 2 offers on funding of approx 1.2 cr & 50 lakhs individually from Angel & Seed guys, respectively. But we found both of them were not in sync with idea. They were more on picking up this cashless chaos going on, and had not that planned approach or understanding of the stuffs.

We too would love to get acquired or acquihired, but, as said above, anything we will do, will be with like minded people or those who value the propostion.

What do you have in mind for the future of your venture?

Currently we are working on product upgradation. When we launched and today, everything which we have there on Paydeck.in is users feedback. And with user feedback we kept on adding stuffs.

Our next release is a better understanding UI. And next to that is our App which shall be launched by first quarter with merchant dedicated console & also merchant pre-listed data. It shall have the UPI based payment facility for merchant invoicing solution, which is another part of Paydeck.

2018 is the year of expansion to South East Asia. We are working on the legal formalities for the same. Our motive is to work mainly in those markets where Credit Card’s user base is & they want to utilise the credit card balances for services where POS is not acceptable.

And the best part is, we can stay operational from India on the same & can manage everything staying a lean organisation. The Power of Technology is the key for the same.

Tell us about the team members working in your startup?

Saurabh Suman - Founder & CEO - Responsible for: Product Management & Banking relations. Co-heads Tech Side Development. Co-heads Operations

Avishek Roy Choudhary - Operations Head, Customer Support - Analysis & Solution, Co-Head - Product Management

Ravi Kumar - Co-Heads Tech Side Development

Advisor: Arunabh Singh, presently works with Citibank & he pro-bono advises us on compliances/regulations etc.

Adviser: Rajeev Krishnan, Country head of National Instruments, & investor at couple of startups in India. He advises us on expansion & strategic planning for growth.
 
Share with us the marketing efforts you have invested till date and the market size and opportunity in this area?

We have not spent a single cent on marketing yet! Whatever we have with us is through word of mouth. Every single user which we have at Paydeck is through organic ways. And now we are going to focus on SEO, but that too we will do completely organic way. We are not burning cash.

We have invested 18 lakhs approx so far & that is in product and its related requirements.

We believe that if you will build a good product & it actually will solve the customers pain point, you don’t need then to pay for your customers to be your customers!