From facilitating digital payments to helping small startups become unicorns, fintech has unlimited potential to unleash India’s entrepreneurial prowess and transform the way business is done in India.

Financial inclusion and mainstreaming India’s unorganized sector

India just cannot become a $5 trillion economy by 2027 without focusing on key areas like increased financial inclusion and mainstreaming of India’s unorganized sector. India’s unorganized sector accounts for 50% of the country’s GDP and employs around 80% of our workforce.

While the size of the unorganized sector is a significant challenge. It also represents a huge opportunity that can accelerate India’s dream of becoming a developed economy. It all depends on how quickly and efficiently can it be brought into the mainstream.  

This transition just cannot be possible without greater and faster adoption of fintech solutions. Fintech democratizes access to financial products. It incentivizes businesses to join the organized sector. Instead of viewing it as an avoidable complication, fintech helps the unorganized sector recognize the move as a sensible and profitable business decision. 

Payment solutions and quick credit may be the most glamorous aspects of fintech. Other solutions like InsurTech and neo-banking can help a business grow to its full potential in the shortest time possible.

Technology as the great equalizer

The combination of technology and financial services creates a level-playing field where the ability of a business to innovate and adapt to changing trends becomes more important than traditional parameters like the firm’s location, size, or even the gender of its owner.

With fintech, a woman running a small business in a Tier-3 city can secure affordable working capital loans, strategic investment advice, wealth, and investment solutions, or just a safer and more robust payment infrastructure just like a multinational corporation located in a metro.

By supplementing and complementing traditional financial institutions and service providers, fintech can either solve or simply render irrelevant the numerous challenges and barriers faced by entrepreneurs in India. 

Catering to the masses and the niche as well

Fintech is inherently disruptive and innovation-centric, which means it eschews the one-size-fits-all approach when catering to its customers. 

This means each customer—whether a work-from-home freelancer, a gig worker, a startup entrepreneur, or a conventional salaried worker—is assured of solutions that help his or her business grow.

All disruptive businesses—from WhatsApp to Tesla—began as niche and unconventional ideas. Fintech has the bandwidth to cater to conventional businesses and their evolving needs and requirements as well as radical ideas that have the potential to transform the world as we know it.  

Solutions for the present and the future

Every business needs to focus on its short-term targets within the ambit of a clearly defined long-term vision or strategy. It needs to adapt to temporary challenges even as it equips itself to evolve to cope with paradigm shifts in the industry and the economy. 

Fintech is the best tool for this challenge because it too is evolving at every step. Fintech may be identified primarily with digital payment solutions that help businesses cut costs, improve customer experience, and strengthen regulatory compliance.

However, fintech’s true value lies in the fact that it is innovative and scalable at the same time. A business that is expanding its digital footprint can easily get secure tailor-made solutions for its unique requirements.

From aggressive strategies during economic booms to conservative yet growth-centric solutions during tough times, fintech combines the best of financial services and technological innovations to help businesses master the present and plan for the future.

PayU—Committed to the India Growth Story

At PayU, we are proud of the fact that more than 4.5 lakh merchants and businesses trust us as their fintech partner. However, what we regard as our biggest achievement is that this number includes businesses across the spectrum—from large corporations and new-age businesses to medium and small business owners.

We believe India’s $5 trillion goal is just the beginning and that India has the potential to achieve faster, more sustainable, and broad-based economic growth by leveraging the power of technology with the innate entrepreneurial talent hidden in every Indian.

The post Cracking India’s $5 Trillion Puzzle—Fintech and MSMEs Hold the Key appeared first on PayU Blog.

What is Black Friday?

Originally an American phenomenon brought to India by the likes of Amazon, many online and omnichannel retailers conducted massive sale events this year on the Black Friday weekend – including all-night shopping in malls and unbelievable discounts on online stores.

We wanted to know how big Black Fridays are in India now. Here’s what the data of eCommerce companies on our platform says about its true impact in India.

Bigger than ever Black Friday sales

Black Friday 2022 (November 25-27) saw an estimated 30-40% jump in transaction volumes compared to 2021.

Retailers also saw a 20% overall increase in GMV during the Black Friday weekend compared to average weekends in November 2022. This shows an overall increase in eCommerce sales, but, more importantly – the number of retailers holding Black Friday sales in India is growing.

Credit cards, UPI drove massive hikes in GMV during Black Friday for top product categories

Black Friday was a huge success for merchants in categories like apparel, accessories, and home furnishings. And credit cards and UPI turned out to be the most popular payment modes used.

GMV from UPI-based purchases in these categories saw a jump of more than 60%. Credit and debit card-based purchases increased by almost 48% and 33%, respectively.

Some categories did better during Black Friday than others

Black Friday sales helped merchants in categories like electronics, fashion, and beauty garner higher GMVs, while travel and hospitality merchants saw a decline in sales during the Black Friday weekend.
The estimated GMV trends for these categories looked something like this:

Black Friday is yet to become a pan-India phenomenon

While buyers from all over India thronged to online and offline stores during the Black Friday weekend, most came from regions with higher urban populations.

This is not necessarily bad news. Data points out the immense potential in Tier 2-3 cities in making Black Friday sales a bigger success.

You too can pull off Black Friday sales with the right payment solutions

Black Fridays are events of scale when hundreds of thousands of people rush to your storefronts to buy their favorite items before they run out. Making such events a success requires robust digital payment mechanisms that can handle high transaction volumes for the smoothest checkout experiences. While debit cards and UPI are table stakes now, payment options like EMI and BNPL can sweeten the deal for your customers.

The post Black Friday had a bigger than ever come back in 2022 appeared first on PayU Blog.

• Achieved a new high of 8 million+ transactions on a single day!
• 70% growth over last month, in terms of volumes
• Average expenditure increased by 52%, compared to festive season 2020

Firstly, What Necessitates the War Room Modus Operandi?

This festive season was unique because of several factors. There was huge pent-up demand on online channels, and several large merchants preponed sales by 10 days. What’s more, some e-retailers decided to go for mega sales at the same time.

Usually, an online purchase journey runs the risk of several dangers – complicated checkout process, user redirection, poor payment integration, etc. This can lead to one of the most dreaded outcomes for an e-retailer – cart abandonment. The stakes are higher during peak festive shopping spree.

Even a mere 2% drop in transaction success rate would result in loss of opportunities worth crores. A two-minute system downtime would affect millions of customers. So, our preparations start a month in advance to ensure smooth and glitch-free transactions during surge periods.

What are the Secrets Behind PayU’s Success?

• It’s all hands on deck: Managing peak festive traffic for over a month needs seamless collaboration and synergy. Senior leaders across the board, including Manas Mishra, Shantanu Preetam, myself, and other business heads work with engineers. They address critical issues during the sale and ensure smooth operations.

• War rooms and green channels: We have instituted Always On war rooms for all key merchants at PayU, to handle any out-of-the-box situations that can potentially crop up. A dedicated green channel staff and a team of 100+ engineers are available around the clock to tackle surge sales.
• Leverage competitive advantage with Wibmo: With Wibmo, a PayU owned PayTech company, we leverage networks to bring together all the financial institutions and big banks. That participate in the first round of sales. PayU does multiple load testings with them to ensure the platform can hit as high as 2800 transactions/second. Despite that it remain stable and scalable.
• The devil lies in the details and micro-level monitoring: There’s always a danger of transactions witnessing sudden drops. Also, we continually give real-time online feedback to the merchant so that they can capitalize on the sale. Even if we lose 5 mins, it can potentially mean a loss of Rs. 50 crores worth of sales for the merchant.

Our ability to innovate, technology readiness, and preemptive assessment ensured that we set a high standard in terms of customer experience. Very few fintech companies in India can do so, and PayU has the unique distinction of leading this success, at scale, every year.

Strength, truly, lies in collaboration. Everyone stepped up to take on the increased workload. Be it was enterprise teams, product teams, engineering teams, or even non-financial teams. By the time the war room closed, we had successfully managed to process more transactions than last year. Even, total value reaches as high as 300% on surge days, compared to 2020. 

The post Straight from the war room: How PayU manages festive sales transactions at scale? appeared first on PayU Blog.