'It’s the Right Time for Investors to Look at Us Now' - Abdul Hadi Shaikh, Fxkart
Fxkart.com is an online aggregator of foreign exchange dealers and aims to improve the consumer experience of carrying out forex transactions while travelling to or from India. The start-up has its international headquarters in Dubai and Indian headquarters in Bengaluru. Their target is to get to the consumer the best deal on forex transactions while helping dealers get visibility with consumers and hence more volume.
In an interaction with BW Disrupt, Abdul Hadi Shaikh, CEO of Fxkart, shared details about his venture:
USP and Market Share
I think we are one of the few independent market place aggregators who are not affiliated to any licensed money changer. If you see in the online space nowadays, there are loads of market places or ‘online for-ex portals’ as they call themselves. But we are the few ones who are non-affiliated to anyone. So we are an independent portal which ranks people and gives the best rates independent to any of the money changers. So we ensure that we fight for the consumer and get him the best deal available in a very transparent manner. That’s one USP that we have. Another USP is our technology. If you visit our website, you’ll have lots of features built in to it that’ll help the consumer decide what he wants. So we believe our technology is far superior to our competition. Third USP is that our strategy of growth incorporates a very cost effective mechanism of scaling the business up.
In the online forex space, we believe we are number one. In terms of percentage, I would say our share would be more than 50% very easily.
Growth Strategy
There is a concern that this is a volume game because you do not have a massive amount of margin to earn from each deal. The margin per transaction is low. But the volume of transactions per customer is very high. If you want to make the company profitable, it has to be a volume game. Now the strategy either is that you have to have a big marketing spend but would your revenue per customer justify the big marketing spend that you do. At some scale, yes. But till we reach that scale, we can’t be spending a crazy amount of money on marketing and wait for it to stabilise for 3-4 years and then make money. So we have now created a technology where we can access customers at a cheaper cost through partners. Our partners are firms like MakeMyTrip who have tied up with us to offer our service to people who are going a trip abroad. We share the revenue we get with them.
Tie ups
We’ve built technology in such a way that people who already control international traffic or who already have international traffic for their other business purposes, once they finish that business purpose, they have monetized their customer and they can redirect their customer to buy foreign exchange which is completely powered by our technology and it’s a very simple plug and play or them. They get additional revenue and we get a customer free of cost. We have tied up with MMT and Quikr Services. On the B2B segment, we have tied up with Travel Boutique Online. We have other smaller tie ups as well which keep giving us constant revenue like Visa consultants, education consultants. We’re looking to tie up with anybody and everybody and we can do it very quickly as well.
Revenue generation model & Funding status
The revenue generation model that we have is that we have a commission in-built into every deal which the money changer pays us. For the consumer it’s free.
We received a seed funding from our co-founder itself way back in March 2015. We’re looking for more funding now. We’re very close to break even on the unitechnomics level. Per transaction we’re positive. So we think it’s the right time for our investor to look at us and we can scale up.
