[Exclusive Interview] This Niche Payment Solutions Startup Is Empowering Lakhs Of Businesses In Smaller Towns

Recently, we interacted with Mr Mohan K, Co-founder and CEO, IppoPay, and discussed how the payment solutions industry is transforming in India, and how IppoPay is empowering the sector, especially the banking sector.,

Highlights from the interview:

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

IppoPay is a payment aggregator based in Chennai providing indigenously built digital banking services. Launched in November 2020, the company has had an incredible journey in offering neo banking services for offline/online merchants majorly for the lower-tier markets. 

The payment infrastructure for online businesses include Payment Gateways and Payouts. IppoPay  provides BaaS to Conventional Banks via full stack tech-API’s thereby digitising various primary functions of banking like Collections, Lendings, Insurance and more. The company also provides core banking infrastructure as an end-to-end banking model for some of the tech- handicapped Regional Rural Banks, Small Finance Banks and Co-Operative Banks for the digitization of data collection and credit assessments.

Our NeoBanking solution for Offline Stores, the ‘Ippo-Store-App’ is a fully featured Payment tool that facilitates Collection and Disbursal of payments. Some salient features of the store app is a Banking Handle, Inbuilt e-POS, DigitalLedger, Inventory, Smart Customer Database, BuyNow-PayLater  and a TongueSpecific Portal.

2. Who are the founders and how do you differentiate IppoPay from its competitors?

Our Founders are Mr.Mohan K (CEO) and Mr. Jai Kumar (CTO). With people consuming our services at a fast rate, we have realised that the market we cater to is rather untapped. The only challenge amongst these merchants is to break the myth of digital payments being insecure. Our business model to Digital Payments is strongly strategized to overcome competitors but a healthy competition is always welcome. On a larger picture, we are our own rivals and with every passing year we aim to be better than the year that is gone by.

3. Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

We are currently focussing on Tier 2, Tier 3 and lower belts. The strategy is pretty simple which is to deliver what you promise to and when people begin to gauge our performance, the goodwill thereof will do its own marketing. For now literacy about the pros and cons of digital payments is given attention to.

4.  We see IppoPay is continuously hiring, do you also feel that the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry?

Yes, as we grow we need the right minds to lead us on the onward journey. We are keen to raise the standard of our products to be on par with global industry standards and the right leadership will help us in doing that. There are no challenges to finding resources, good things take time but nothing challenging as such.

5. How IppoPay aims to create a difference for the merchants that you onboard on the platform?

We look forward to giving them a wholesome experience when it comes to collecting and disbursing payments online with nill or fewer occurrences of issues, best support and after-sales service will help them be confident about taking a long standing digital shift for their businesses.

6. Considering your focus is on Tamil Nadu, do you plan to expand to other parts of the country?

The company started off serving tier 2 and lower tier rural merchants in TamilNadu. But while we will continue offering our services here, we are also beginning to explore other markets and demographics.

About IppoPay
IppoPay is a verticalized payments solutions company providing payment infrastructure to small businesses in Tier-3 to 6 towns, and other large TAM (Total Addressable Market) business segments with unique needs such as education and agri-tech. The Company has over 1,70,000+ MSME merchants in Tamil Nadu. Recently IppoPay brought on-board a senior payments veteran Atish Shelar with 2 decades experience in the payments space across HDFC Bank, Billdesk and M2P. The Company is invested in by Coinbase Global Inc., Better Capital and Blume Founders Fund.