India’s digital payment infrastructure has matured remarkably, propelling India to the forefront of digital payment innovation! Post the pandemic outbreak, SMEs are moving online making their digital presence in the market with sector-specific digital SaaS products. Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) consociates with Easebuzz as Digital Finance Management Partner in 16th India Digital Summit held on 11th & 12th January 2022, a two-day virtual conference on supercharging startups and SMEs where industry experts dove deeper into the start-up ecosystem.
The conference was held virtually with esteemed speakers such as Shri Piyush Goyal- the Honorable Minister of Commerce and Industry, Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, and Minister of Textiles, Aman Jain – Head of Government Affairs & Public Policy from Google, Sumit Monga – Head of Government Affairs from Lenovo, Vineet Deopujari – VP & Business Head of Startups & SMBs from Paytm, Adwaita Nayar – Co-Founder of Nykaa, Bhawna Sangwan – Director & Associate General Counsel of Payments & Privacy from Amazon, Ganesh Kollegal – AVP of Government Affairs from Swiggy, and Jahid Ahmed – Vice President & Head of Digital, Content & Social Media Marketing from HDFC Bank, among others.
Concerns related to how FinTech will help MSMEs (Digital Lending / Underwriting, REG Tech, Connected Banking, Data Aggregation, and Analytics, etc.), streamlining finances for small business growth began to introduce innovative fintech technologies for merchants and customers.
The conference was organized around two thoughts, Digital SaaS products, and Payment/Collection products, in accordance with the theme, ‘Supercharging Startups,’ with panel discussions led by innovators from fintech and financial institutes.
Karan Manshani, Vice President – Payment Solutions, Easebuzz, shared his views on ‘Paving way for cashless economy.” along with other eminent speakers of the industry which included Vineet Deopujari – the VP & Business Head of Startups & SMBs from Paytm Payments Services, Sonika Chandra – the VP & Head of Consumer Platforms & Payments from PhonePe, and Neha Gupta, the Head of Issuance from Amazon Pay.
He commented that with an advanced market infrastructure, banking technology, and networking, India is significantly carving out a cashless society but there are people in semi-urban areas who lack trust in digital payment due to the affordability of technology.
On accepting digital payment methods in SMEs, Karan Manshani also commented that the trust of using digital SaaS payment products comes from the quality of security the product has to offer to your business. “Trust comes with Security”. It is a core business function and Easebuzz makes sure payment products it offers are safe, secure, and reliable to the users. This improves customer retention and builds consumers’ trust in payment products required by the MSMEs.
Siddharth Dani, CFO, Easebuzz also led an enthralling discussion panel on “Accelerating Digitisation of MSMEs with a powerful trio of Digital Payments, Connected Banking, Cloud-based SaaS”. The panelists were: Gaurav Goel – the National Head of Start Up & New Economy Business from YES Bank and Sandeep Laxman – Head of Fintech BD from Amazon Web Services.
The discussion focused on innovations and advancements in the Indian digital payment space, as well as how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) connect to the digital world and move towards new digital solutions. Speaking on the digital payment space, Siddharth Dani commented saying that he believes payment is an event; a collection of payments is a process and Easebuzz calls itself a “Collections gateway” from where SMEs can manage their collections with Ease.
The panelist also discussed the difficulty SMEs are facing in assessing and affording the right technology. The quality of support business requires in terms of the technology as well as the ease of use of the products by keeping services elastic in nature. These pain points were discussed in detail with Sandeep Laxman and Gaurav Goel.
Easebuzz proposed how digital financial management solutions can help SME businesses to reduce operational costs and focus more on their business and leave payment and payout to a single centric solution-based approach where Banks and Cloud SaaS-based solutions play a pivot role towards the India Financial Inclusion as a supporting pillar for StartUps, SMEs and MSMEs. Easebuzz also suggested a customized solution kit for the Indian market to help SMEs scale their business in a Fast, Reliable, and Secure manner.
