Exclusive Interview with Digvijay Singh Baghel, Senior VP of Technology, Innoviti Payment Solutions

The emergence of cutting-edge technologies has encouraged the fintech industry to transform traditional modes of payments into smart ones in this tech-driven market. Technologies are invented to help in seamless transactions at a faster speed through glocalization across the world. Customers have started preferring multiple cost-effective methods for payments purposes.

This is an exclusive interview with Digvijay Singh Baghel, Senior VP of Technology, Innoviti Payment Solutions, who has elaborated how Innoviti is becoming a pioneer company to provide necessary help to businesses in extracting better value from valuable transactions efficiently and effectively through its self-healing technology.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers 

Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt. Ltd. is India's largest payment solutions provider to enterprise merchants, with a 76% market share of all payments happening in this segment. It has been a pioneer in using technology to help businesses extract better value from retail transactions than anyone else. The company processes over US$10 billion of merchant payments from over 1000 cities with a volume throughput per installation 2X of the country's average. Bessemer Venture Partners, USA, FMO, Netherlands, and Catamaran Ventures, India are investors in the company. The company has several patents filed for with three awards— Innoviti won Mastercard's Innovation Wizards Award, Reliance's Most Promising Growth Consumer Finance Award and Deloitte Fastest Growing Companies in Asia award in 2020. Innoviti is the only Indian payments SaaS company to be awarded the coveted SOC3 seal of excellence for adherence to principles of trust in privacy, security, confidentiality, availability, and processing of transactions.

2. What is your aim and vision with Innoviti?

The vision with Innoviti is to fuel the growth of merchants by using payment technology in unconventional ways to attract more walk-ins, drive more conversions, and enable more capital.

Banks, brands, and consumers have encouraged payment technology used in all channels right from U.P.I., peer 2 peer, digital wallet, mPOS, and voice payment. Today payment platforms are not the only mode of transactions but have also assisted merchants to increase their revenues by introducing more innovative campaigns and offerings like zero cost E.M.I., flexible E.M.I., B.N.P.L. (Buy-now-pay-later), cashback, etc.

At Innoviti, the team always keeps customers at the center and has designed products to provide them with a seamless, innovative, and cost-effective payments experience. It has continuously evolved the product offerings via tech innovations, empowering merchants, banks, and brand partners to provide better customer service.

3. What are the types of technologies that Innoviti has been using? 

Innoviti designs products focused on extracting better value out of a payment transaction than anyone else. The company recently announced, G.E.N.I.E., a smart marketing application for local mobile dealers to help them fight back online by bringing the same technology used by online merchants to attract consumers. This product supports conventional brand E.M.I. schemes and unique and exclusive E.M.I. and cashback schemes not even available online.

Furthermore, Innoviti's self-healing technology for payment terminals 'Juno' enables automatic detection and healing of complex payment systems. Juno takes over from where humans find it hard to find patterns. It is built by using advanced automation and AI/ ML technologies to detect and cure issues and lead to significant business impact by ensuring zero downtime of all terminals. Juno has ensured an uptime of 99.7% across its pan-India base of payment terminal installations since its launch in 2020. The technology pro-actively tracks five million transactions every day to identify and resolve issues that are hard for humans to detect.

Innoviti is leveraging on various low code application platforms (LCAP), using which our merchants and partners can design various campaigns and offerings – like zero cost E.M.I., Flexible E.M.I., B.N.P.L. (Buy-now-pay-later), cashback, etc., and get more store walk-ins, extend customized offers to consumers. Using our in-house developed analytics platform – SPARCS merchants get an x-ray view of their payment operations.

4. What are the major trends that the digital payment industry is seeing? 

The payments industry will witness innovative trends that shall set the tone for 2021. Some of the trends to watch out for in the payments industry includes:

• QR code payments: Payments via QR codes will continue to prove their flexibility, especially in emerging markets. Dynamic QR codes based on POS machines (Innoviti's patent) and QR on invoices are some modes that offer better flexibility, convenience, and means of reconciliation than static QR.
• Tap and go payments: NFC-based contactless payment devices have enabled tap and go payments. Recently, RBI has enhanced limits for contactless card payments from ₹2,000 to ₹5,000, which is a much-needed boost to increase the transaction volume of contactless payments.
• Wearable payment devices: Wearable payments are emerging as a mode of payment by using advanced technology integrated into user's smartwatches, smart rings, and wristbands. As per allied market research, the wearable payments market is expected to reach US$1.37 trillion by 2027.
• API-based payments (or Integrated Payment Systems): Companies like Stripe are leveraging the opportunity to provide APIs for embedding payments services to businesses. This has resulted in the overall growth of the payment industry by enhancing partnerships between firms.
• Distributed ledger for cross-border payments: Distributed ledger (commonly known as blockchain) technologies are looking to modernize this by using "smart contracts" for cross-border payments. Although still in the early stage, the end-use cases of the DLT framework are tremendous.

5. What are some challenges faced by the industry today?

While the growth has been rapid, the industry is still nascent. Some of the biggest challenges facing the payments industry include:

Frauds: As different modes of payments evolve and newer technologies are being tested, the probability of fraudulent transactions also increases. As per RBI data, between April 2009 and September 2019, fraudsters siphoned off ₹615.39 crores in more than 1.17 lakh credit and debit card fraud cases. While some competitors are still struggling with various malware, compromising the integrity of transactions and customer data being shared in an unsecured manner, Innoviti is India's first payments SaaS company to receive Coveted SOC3 Seal of Excellence for adhering to trust services principles.

Transaction Failures: Failing of various transactions because downtime of primary server results in transaction failures. Smart server switching logic needs to be implemented to ensure that a connected platform processes a transaction if the primary server is down.

Chargebacks: Improper handling of disputed charges and transactions can cause anxiety and loss of revenue for merchants. This problem amplifies in foreign currency transactions where the FX conversion has already been done.

User adoption: Customers must trust any payment solution that they are willing to use. Fintech can provide user-friendly systems with good UI/UX, better and faster than traditional systems, but if they lack user trust, they will struggle.

6. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Innoviti uses technology to turn payment transactions into a smart marketing platform that provides merchants superior payment processing and helps them create new and unique ways to attract more walk-ins, convert more walk-ins, and earn more profits. By enabling merchants to digitally collaborate with banks and brands wanting to target the same customer, Innoviti uses payment technology in unconventional ways to turn payment transactions into customer acquisition and retention tools for merchants, banks, and brands, by bringing them on to a common platform, and helping them deliver unique customer experiences. Each business gets access to 3X loyal consumers at 1/3rd the cost, accelerating sales with unmatched efficiencies.

7. What is the size of the Analytics team at Innoviti?

At Innoviti, there is an analytics team of approx. 25 members. This spans various domains like data warehousing, analytics, BI, etc.