Mr Balaji Jagannathan, Co-founder and Director of Paycorp.io

Interview with Mr Balaji Jagannathan, Co-founder and Director of Paycorp.io

Balaji Jagannathan, a passionate numerate, is a highly motivated entrepreneur known for his methodical, systematic and meticulous approach.

With over two decades of experience in the global payments industry, Balaji is the co-founder of Paycorp.io.

His exceptional skill set, which includes software product development, cost accounting background, and banking expertise, led him to venture into the banking and payments automation domain.

Having gained extensive insights into banking operations across diverse geographies, Balaji and his fellow co-founders identified banking payments as a high-growth segment that required deep hands-on experience to identify pain points and provide solutions.

Prior to his entrepreneurial journey, Balaji developed banking automation products that were successfully integrated into multiple banks worldwide, including India, UAE, UK, Malaysia, and Brunei.

He is credited with building a strong intellectual property in the niche payments space, which has processed over a billion payment transactions with 100% availability over a decade of operation.

As the co-founder and CEO of Paycorp.io, Balaji spearheads organizational strategy formulation, finance, branding, marketing, and new market penetrations.

He holds an MBA degree and is an avid learner of new languages, reader of books, watcher of movies, wildlife enthusiast, and blogger.

Balaji firmly believes in trusting and entrusting and looks up to Roger Federer and Rahul Dravid as his role models.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you started Paycorp.io?

Balaji Jagannathan: Digital payments is evolving rapidly in India. Retail (P2P and P2B) payment has been revolutionised in India in the last 5 years.

Cash transactions have significantly dropped In urban and semi-urban regions of the country. B2B payments are at the beginning of a similar evolution in India.

At Paycorp, we have recognised this fact and decided that we must spearhead this B2B digital payments revolution.

The founding team of Paycorp has over 25 years of experience in delivering digital automation of payments in India, Middle East, Europe and Far East.

Please tell us a little about your entrepreneurial journey

Balaji Jagannathan: Before finding a point of convergence, Paycorp.io’s founders all had prior experience working in the banking and payment industries.

The first end to end NACH automation in India was credited to Karthik Thenkarai prior to the founding of Paycorp. NACH offers banks, financial institutions, corporations, and the government a digital solution to facilitate high volume interbank payments.

Anish Thomas Alex, our CTO and co-founder, has over 20 years of software architecture experience and is an expert in designing and developing Banking Product architecture rapidly.

Since we have been working closely with banks in India, Middle East and elsewhere, we are uniquely positioned to identify specific white spaces where payments automation can improve efficiency, reduce cost or increase revenue generation potential.

Kindly brief us about Paycorp.io, its specialization, and the services that it offers

Balaji Jagannathan: B2B payment receives significantly less attention than retail payments. We think that given the recent advancements in the digital payments, now is the ideal time to bridge the gap in B2B payment digitisation.

There is a significant opportunity to automate recurring payment use cases. When compared to traditional manual models, which have 65% success rate, Paycorp guarantees 95% success rate in B2B recurring auto debit processing. Besides, we guarantee same-day realisation of payment as against a standard 2 day settlement period.

What is your biggest USP?

Balaji Jagannathan: Same day realisation of B2B auto-debit payments. 95% success rate in setting up Auto-debit mandates as against industry average of 65%.

What sets Paycorp.io apart from other players in the market?

Balaji Jagannathan: As we completely eliminate delays and failures in setting up and collecting recurring auto-debit payments, we are miles ahead of our rivals.

We collect the payment the same day as opposed to our competitors’ turn around time of two working days.

We provide many payment options, such as ACH and UPI, and enable a number of digital touchpoints for convenient access, such as QR Code, WhatsApp, link push, and web portal.

Also, Paycorp interfaces directly with eight bank partners in India. Besides India, we are present in the United Arab Emirates as well.

How has Paycorp.io evolved since its inception, and what are your plans for the company’s future growth and expansion?

Balaji Jagannathan: As a tech-based business, we provide fully automated “Do it yourself onboarding,” which enables corporate customers to onboard within minutes.

We are the first to introduce ACH gateway option to our bank partners. Our bank partners can now extend ACH based auto-debit option to offer easy instalment payments to their customers.

We engage with our bank partners and regulators to introduce upgrades to the digital platform ahead of competition.

So our bank partners and corporate customers remain as market leaders in  digital recurring payments ecosystem.

Can you walk us through your payment processing platform and the technology behind it?

Balaji Jagannathan: Paycorp.io has built an elaborate digital payments processing platform which can process ACH, UPI, NEFT and RTGS payments at very high volumes.

We have interfaced this digital platform with eight banks in India and the list is growing. The platform offers APIs for corporates to integrate.

The corporates who access our APIs can process their recurring collections and direct payments seamlessly and reconcile their inbound and outbound payments and track their finances on a daily basis.

How does Paycorp.io ensure the security and privacy of its customers’ data and transactions?

Balaji Jagannathan: Paycorp.io does not store any of customer’s sensitive data in our database. Instead we use the secure network offered by NPCI and UIDAI to authenticate customers safely.

We only use the authentication success / failure information to process the auto-debit setup. Paycorp.io does not access the customer’s financial information as well.

Instead our platform forwards the payment messages to the respective banks, receive response messages and update the corporates through secure APIs.

Since Paycorp.io consistently plays the role of message manager adhering to the security protocols of banks, NPCI and UIDAI, it is one of the safest methods to process B2B payments.

What are some of the biggest challenges that Paycorp.io has faced, and how have you overcome them?

Balaji Jagannathan: While the rest of the world focuses solely on using digitalization to improve the P2P customer experience, Paycorp.io is dedicated to bringing about a revolution in the MSME, NBFC and businesses.

Each business segment has its own unique challenge. Understanding the challenges of each segment, introducing innovative solutions to address those challenges, educating business owners about the soundness of the solution have all been challenges.

However, once convinced, the business owners are quick to adopt and also to refer us to their peers in their segment.

How do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in the payment services industry, and how do you incorporate them into your business strategy?

Balaji Jagannathan: We engage with industry regulators such as NPCI and RBI on a regular basis to know and even shape their vision for the national digital payments.

When they roll out new initiatives, we often offer to pilot those initiatives in our technology stack and make them available to our banking partners and corporate customers. Thus we are always ahead of the market in rolling out cutting edge advancements to B2B payments.

How does Paycorp.io work with its clients to understand their unique payment processing needs and deliver customized solutions?

Balaji Jagannathan: We allocate business analysts who are experts in the B2B payments space. The business analysts engage with the bank’s business team to understand specific requirements.

We then brainstorm the requirements internally identify solution options and present to the bank’s business team for their review and further refinement.

Once the bank team is convinced with the solution, we roll out the solution and support them until the process is refined and the end customer is totally satisfied.

What is your success tip for young and aspiring entrepreneurs?

Balaji Jagannathan: When it comes to my source of inspiration, I always believe that one must Trust and entrust. And then test of time is the toughest test. Integrity and commitment are unparalleled.

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