Fintech start up
ePayLater, operated by Mumbai based Arthashastra Fintech Pvt Ltd, has raised a whopping $2 millio in its Angel round of funding. The company, founded by Akshat Saxena, Prasannaa Muralidharan, Uday Somayajula, Aurko Bhattacharya and Shanmuhanathan Thiagaraja, provides a 1-click checkout service to shoppers on e-commerce portals.
This pioneering concept in the Indian e-commerce space allows customers to “buy now and pay later” on online portals with just a single click. The customers are billed only after they receive the delivery of the product and hence the solution addresses the trust issues related to online shopping and acts as a good substitute for COD. In addition, the customers get 14 days to make the payment, in which time they can do many more such transactions through a single click checkout, bunch them all together and make a single payment at the end of the period. Further, since the checkout is single click it offers a near 100% transaction success rate unlike payment gateways which witness significant drops. Put together, it extends ease of shopping to customers, and higher volumes and margins to the merchant.
“This is a product for “online-first” and “first online” customers. We realized that there are many online-first customers like us who transact very frequently on e-commerce portals. Our own experience of payments left much to be desired. At the same time, we noticed the inertia of others in making online purchases due to trust issues, leading either to a very high proportion of COD transactions or reduced sales for online merchants. That's when we stumbled upon this concept of 1-click checkout powered by “insta-credit” which provides the customers the smoothest possible checkout by decoupling shopping from payments.” says co-founder Akshat Saxena,
The company makes use of alternate data for the purpose of credit and fraud analysis and has plans to extend the use of it for other allied services as well. “Our proprietary algorithms and machine learning technologies use structured and unstructured data from various sources to provide real time insights into customer behaviour for our credit decisioning.” says Prasanna Muralidharan.
“In a country like ours, where the proportion of unbanked is significant and where credit penetration is abysmally low, a product like ePayLater provides access to credit to the deserving individuals who would otherwise be denied loans products by traditional financial institutions and also allows them to build a credit profile.” Says Uday Somayajula another co-founder.
The company plans to invest in product development in a big way. “Innovation being the core DNA of the company, we plan to invest in our technology to ensure that the platform remains flexible and scalable. This would allow us to unlock alternate revenue streams in very quick time in the future.” Says Shanmuhanathan.
"We have seen a very encouraging response across all segments of e-commerce industry. Our concept is now maket-tested as it's helping e-commerce players boost volumes and margins already. We are looking forward to the journey ahead" says Aurko Bhattacharya.
