The Client
Among the top five private sector banks in India, the client offers a wide range of financial products. Headquartered in Mumbai, India, the bank has a huge market capitalization and sells financial services to large and mid-size corporates, SME, and retail businesses. The overseas operations of the client are spread over 11 international locations.
Business Context
Merchant businesses including MSMEs and institutional entities (schools, not-for-profit organizations, etc.) are an important customer segment for the client. Onboarding new merchant businesses and helping them increase cash flow in their current accounts is at the core of the bank’s marketing and sales strategy.
One of the revenue challenges for merchant businesses is tracking invoices and collecting payments from their end customers. The existing collection methods such as cheques/demand drafts/cash were too cumbersome to manage and track payments. It caused difficulties to the customers who prefer the convenience of online payments.
The client wanted to empower its merchant businesses with an easy-to-setup and customizable digital payment collection platform. The new platform should provide merchants the flexibility to choose one or multiple payment options for their customers.
The goal was to attract and onboard new current account customers, strengthen the relationship with the existing customers, and upsell other banking products to them.
The Challenge
Building a payment collection platform that allows customers to pay from any digital payment method such as net banking, UPI, debit/credit cards, or digital wallets is challenging as it requires integrations with multiple payment gateways and systems. The challenge would be manifold if every deployment of the platform requires multiple gateway integrations.
Also, the diversity of merchant businesses adds another layer of complexity in the design and development of the payment platform. Depending upon the nature of their business and unique needs, the merchants need specific fields of information to be captured along with every instance of payments received from the customers. This requires payment collection forms with customizable fields of information that can be included in customer invoices and receipts generated by the merchants.
The Solution
After a thorough review process, the bank chose Tejora’s fully configurable payment collection platform to deliver a seamless payment experience to its customers. Tejora’s platform, built using open-source technology frameworks, addressed features and functionalities required by the bank to empower its current account holders with a multi-channel customer payment collection.
The fully-configurable digital platform allowed merchants to generate, set up, and track customer invoices with a multi-channel payment collection capability. The bank could now roll out this white-label solution to current account holders of any size to streamline their payment collection and reduce operational overheads.
Key Features
The payment collection platform comes pre-bundled with
different payment gateway integrations. The merchants can then choose the payment
methods they want to offer to their customers. The platform negated the hassle of multiple
gateway integrations. It also eliminated the need for expert technical assistance of every
deployment of the platform for merchant businesses.
Also, the platform provides customizable collection templates
that can be configured for different merchant businesses as per their specific requirements,
making the entire process lean, efficient, and fast.
- Integration with a wide array of electronic payment methods including net banking (NEFT, RTGS, and IMPS), debit/credit cards, UPI, digital wallets, etc
- A fully configurable system with no development needed from merchants
- Easy onboarding and initial setup process for banks and financial institutions
Some of the key functionalities of the platform include
- Customized dashboards to view date-wise, category-wise payments, and disbursements
- Three-way reconciliation among banks, payment gateways, and merchants
- Data analytics-enabled features to reduce NPAs and identify early warning indicators (EWIs)
- Admin interfaces (for the bank and merchants)
- Invoice upload module to share invoices directly with customers
- Built-in, robust mechanism to prevent duplicate payments
- Online refund facility
- Discounts and late fee management
- E-tendering facility for receiving deposit amounts for tenders
- Provision to allow seamless over-the-country (OTC) payments
The Impact
The easy-to-implement payment collection platform strengthened the bank’s position in the current account space. It improved their ability to onboard new customers faster while empowering the existing ones with better cash flows and book size. The platform also gave the bank key insights into merchant cash flow and spending patterns.
- 180+ new merchant businesses onboarded as current account customers within three months of the launch of the platform
- Onboarding process achieved with minimal paperwork and 10-20% faster
- Recorded 2000+ transactions daily with a projection of 22,000 to 35,000 transactions in the coming years
- Over 1000 mobile transactions daily, giving a huge fillip to the client’s focus on mobile accessibility
- Ability to upsell banking products to merchants
Tech Stack
