Tapits Technologies: Empowering the Financial Sector of India

In the interview with insights success, Pratyush Halen, CEO and Founder of Tapits Technologies, gave some insightful answers highlighting the influences made by the company to take finance industry industry to next level.

1. Kindly brief us about the company and what kind of products and services the company provides to their clients.
   1. Tapits Technologies is a collective of people from various domains, viz. Technology, Banking and Fintech with a combined experience of over 50 years in the development of financial and banking technology,
   2. Our company, under its brand, Fingpay, enables the 1.12 Billion Indians to be a part of the Indian Banking and Financial system and helps them go cashless and paperless while making Payments or while accessing Loans, Insurance and financial products, just with the touch of a finger.
   3. How biometric technologies are creating secured world?

The increased use of mobile smart devices for financial transactions has prompted banks, payment providers and regulators to demand increased levels of security and identity assurance to provide better protection against fraud. Passwords and pin codes are slow and not as secure. There has been a steady increase in data breaches in the last 2 years, prompting payment providers and financial institutions to explore more secure modes of authentication. Biometric authentication helps address this problem. Acting as strong authentication to secure online transactions, biometrics also increases customer trust and improves reputation. Below are problems biometrics can solve for financial service firms:

1. Fraud Reduction: Biometric authentication allows financial firms independence from passwords, PINs, and tokens, which are susceptible to hacking. Biometrics are unique for every individual and in a world where hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, biometrics allows financial institutions to prove, beyond a doubt, who is requesting access.
2. Convenient Authentication: Industries are using different means of bio-metric authentication, based on their line of business e.g. voice recognition for securing the contact center channel, fingerprints for mobile payments, facial recognition for remote customer registration and iris for digital payment authorization. Each method serves as a convenient, frictionless solution to customer authentication while providing multi-factor authentication. 

3. What are the Challenges and opportunities in the deployment of Biometric Technologies and how likely they are deployed in the future?
4. Some of the challenges faced with Biometric Technologies are as follows:
   1. Breach is irreparable: Though biometrics is more secure than passwords, and harder to replicate, a security breach is irreversible. We can change passwords, but can never change biometric data
   2. Secondly, mass market biometrics are device dependent. This limits the usage.
5. Some of issues faced on field include dependence on reliable network connectivity and mismatch in biometrics. This hinders the ability to use the system on a larger scale.

4. Kindly tell us about your inception story.

The need for developing simple yet powerful products targeted towards the underserved and unbanked triggered the inception of the company. The team had the vision for the future and the idea of implementing biometric based payments was perceived in 2016 when no industry player was implementing it. The company brought the product to market in just 2 years. The product connects the corporate and last mile customer with the services which would help them uplift and get plethora of useful services which will give them access to market, credit, technology, banking, innovations etc.
Problems that we are trying to solve through our products and service, for the Rural and Semi-Urban populace are:

1. Easy Access to Banking points
2. Access to Micro Finance
3. Access to other financial products such as Insurance
4. Autonomy to make hassle free Utility and Bill Payments
5. Collections of EMI, Payments, Cash Management
6. Brief us about the Founder/CEO of the company? What kind of ethics, principles and manner of working does he/she observes while running the business?

Pratyush Halen, CEO and Founder of Tapits Technologies, has a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. He started his career with Amdocs as a software designer. At Amdocs his team won the Amdocs Innovation Contest for developing a USSD based solutions for the rural sectors in India. This win fuelled his desire to start his own venture and work in the direction of servicing the rural sector of India. InApril of 2016, along with Anuraag Agarwal, he co-founded Tapits Technologies Pvt Ltd, a biometric based payments application. Since then, Pratyush has come a long way in creating a suite of banking products and services while juggling the expectations of multiple Banks. As the team grew to 22+ members, the daunting responsibility of creating internal growth has been a major role in his profile.

6. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions and clients’ feedback that are notable to you.

Over the last 3 years, Fingpay has won the following accolades:

1. Winner HDFC Bank Innovation Summit 2016
2. WInner Axis Bank payment hackathon 2016
3. Winner Fintegrate Zone 2017
4. Next Big Idea contest (Zone Startups) 2017

Fingpay was featured in the following articles/news

1. CNBC Awaaz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDeKVLLFQ8M&t=4s)
2. ICICI Bank’s Investment in Fingpay was featured in prominent news papers such as, Economic Times, Mint, VC circle etc.
3. Fingpay’s work with Cashless Catalyst was featured by Yourstory (https://yourstory.com/2018/06/five-startups-taking-fintech-last-mile)

Fingpay was invited to share our experience and challenges in our endeavour towards bringing about Financial Inclusion by:

1. The Hon. Secretary and Hon. Joint Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
2. Associate VP, NPCI on multiple occasions
3. Sa-Dhan (Microfinance SRO) on multiple occasions
4. Kindly brief us about your strategies to tackle the competition in your sector. What steps are you taking to ensure that you continue to grow and develop?
   1. Develop new markets by Extending services to other sectors such as retail and ecommerce players
   2. Diversify portfolio by Building a customer application for demand creation where rural customers can order banking and related services at doorstep.
   3. Increase penetration by Upselling and cross selling financial products to business correspondents and customers such as
      1. Working capital for the retailers
      2. Credit facilities for the customers

• Institutional lending to MFI segment through larger banks/ NBFC’s

1. Build traction by providing Cash flow predictions and advanced analytics for institutions using the data being generated on Fingpay platform 

8. What are the benefits gained by your clients while doing business with you?
   1. Fully automated solutions from Payments, settlements, reconciliations, MIS,
   2. Chargebacks, exception handling, self on-boarding.
   3. Reduced collection costs in the range of 1-1.5% compared to the conventional collection model of lending institutions.

9. What is USP of your company?
   1. Ready to use plug and play tech platform with 50K+ merchant points for collections from rural / semi-rural areas.
   2. Strong industry presence with 25+ institutions like microfinance, NBFC’s, small finance banks, larger banks which are deeply integrated with Fingpay
   3. Captive Customer base to offer various products across the customer’s life cycle

10. What can be expected from your company in the upcoming years? Brief us about the future vision of the company.

Company plans to revolutionize the payment collections in India solving the logistical inefficiencies in the system. With it’s cutting edge technology and creating value for all stakeholders, it is expected to change the system of payment collections in rural and semi-rural areas.